


Spectrum

by blueincandescence



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-23
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 06:19:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/619021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueincandescence/pseuds/blueincandescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Once you've done what you had to, they'll never let you do what you want to."</i> Selina Kyle earned her clean slate from a martyred legend who'd seen more to her than criminal intent and killer heels. But when Bruce Wayne is recalled to life, Selina is forced to fight tooth and claw with him and against him as their dark pasts converge to threaten the light of their future together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. LET THE SPECTRUM IN

**SPECTRUM**

_**a Catwoman Continuation** _

**by thatcraftykid**

* * *

**1\. LET THE SPECTRUM IN**

* * *

_— Florence + the Machine —_

* * *

_When we first came here we were cold and we were clear_

_With no colors on our skin, we were light and paper-thin_

_And when we first came here we were cold and we were clear_

_With no colors on our skin, 'til you let the spectrum in_

* * *

_—Gotham City, September 2016—_

* * *

"What do you see?" he asks her in a voice breathless, gruff with exertion. That voice, almost. A shade of it.

The face she holds in her hands is half-shadowed by the dark hair that has fallen over her left shoulder. His eyes are a glittering black, a shining hazel.

She arches her spine to curl in close. "I see…" Her breath flutters on the sharp line of his cheek, on the soft curve of his lip. The shadow moves with the tilt of her head. She aligns herself with him, nose to nose. "All of you."

His mouth pushes against hers, his hand pushes his body up. He presses her body, her mouth down with enough quick force to knock over the lantern beside them on the floor.

Without its flickering light, as he pulls back she loses him to the darkness. Except for the hot, rough weight of his chest, rising and falling against her rib cage.

His fingers find the crease in her brows without hesitation. He slides her eyelids closed. "What do you see?" he asks again in a voice that sounds lighter. Farther away.

He must feel the movement of her eyes as she searches the impenetrable dark for his right answer. The pressure of his fingertips increase.

A slow explosion of color starts behind her lids.

* * *

_—Gotham City, March 2016—_

* * *

What she saw was a light. She closed her eyes so tight against the bright, white flash that bursts of color stained her vision. They shone like a specter when she forced herself to watch his end.

A weak, high-pitched noise escaped from her throat, muffled by her shaking palm but not unnoticed. A heavy arm went around her shoulders.

As a thick cloud mushroomed over the skyline of the city that — after all she'd said and all he'd done — the city that could be saved, a police commissioner held her, convicted cat burglar Selina Kyle, like a friend as dear as the one they believed lost to that colorless light.

She'd thought him lost before. Thought him lost to the deep shadows cast by a terrorist, but she had not been sure. She'd slunk back, taking with her the agonizing hope of possibility.

Now she had only blinding certainty.

Commissioner Jim Gordon's embrace was steady, with no motive beyond a sharing of knowledge. He murmured, "The Batman." A sharing of pain. "Bruce Wayne." Of guilt.

Selina waited until daylight shimmered through the cloud. She imagined its heat was the sting behind her eyes. Or that it was relief, plain and simple.

She turned her back to Gordon and took off her mask, dripping the wetness that had pooled at the bottom onto the cracked pavement beneath her clicking heels.

Three times Selina had walked away from certain death because of a man she would never know but would always understand. Not on the surface, but deep down in the place inside of her that made her break her number one rule and sacrifice a sure escape.

Not much of a sacrifice, set against his.

From behind, Gordon said, "There are a lot of criminals out there needing to be put back in Blackgate Prison."

Her pace slowed to a halt. A change of heart didn't a clean slate make. "You know who you're talking to, don't you?" she asked in her trademark arch tone.

"Yes. Someone who is…uniquely qualified to assist the Gotham PD."

Selina turned in profile so he could see the disdainful curl of her lip. She didn't mean to show him the quiver. "What makes you think I'd even consider it?"

"He trusted you enough to go to war with him. That's enough for me to trust you'll want to make sure the peace he bought us was worth the price."

Even with her eyes closed, the spectrum of color lingered in the darkness. Three lives she owed the Batman.

Selina did a sharp turn on her heel, slipping on her mask as she went. Leaned over his psychotic motorcycle, she said with borrowed authority, "Not all 'criminals' deserve to rot in Blackgate."

"I'm only interested in the ones who do."

She revved the engine, forcing Gordon to take a step back. "I'm done when I say I'm done. Then I walk away and no one follows."

"You have my word, Ms. Kyle." A promise from someone who, according to his own confession, for eight years was able to praise the mad man who'd tried to kill his child with a poker face even she'd never thought to question.

But if they were talking about who the Batman trusted and why that should matter, it had to cut both ways. Selina nodded once and pulled down her goggles.

As she whipped the cycle around, Gordon called out, "How will I get in touch with you?"

"Don't call me, I'll call you." A passable line to speed off on, but her heart wasn't in it. It felt far away.

Six miles away, if she was going to give in to the same stupid sentiment that had made her steal precious seconds from him for a kiss when a nuclear holocaust was on the line.

They could have gone anywhere. One of them still could.

Selina drove around Gotham City on a vehicle built for war wearing high-tech, custom-fit black leather in broad daylight. She heard no gunshots, no screams. People took to the streets for quiet reflection, arms linked around each other.

After their initial shock of hope faded with the sound of the engine, she might as well have been invisible. Except when she jumped a curb in the Narrows. There she sped by a teenage girl in ripped jeans holding up her mother, who had one arm in a tattered bathrobe. Five months of hardship dropped from the girl's face as she watched Selina maneuver the savior of Gotham's cycle like it was hers by right.

She could have used it to get off the island. But Gordon said it, she had to know the peace he bought them was worth the price. And the one way to do that was to do what he would do – watch over his city.

By nightfall, the only fire in Gotham was the one relit on top of the bridge. From Uptown to Old Town, they came out to watch the symbol of their freedom from fear burn for them. Under its light, they organized safe havens and search parties.

She knew then that her promise to Gordon wasn't going to amount to much work. The citizens of Gotham had taken back their city with the strength of its protector's convictions.

* * *

Selina Kyle was a citizen of Gotham. Born and raised, for better or worse. For worse, her six-inch thick police report would say. She would have agreed months ago. Even days ago.

Tonight she was back in the sewers, that last refuge of the reckoners. The light of his idling cycle made a trail of blood gleam in the darkness. Selina traced the uneven wall, a tight smile on her masked face at the thought of wounded prey. Barsard, mangled and cornered, was nobody's right-hand anymore.

Further along, the angle of the blood trail slumped and thickness spread. In several places, it was clear he'd stumbled to his knees and had managed to get back on his feet only with an extraordinary show of will.

Selina readied her Glock, her admiration for enemies a very finite feeling. Her hand atop bloody prints, she climbed a rusted ladder through a blasted opening to prowl the dim, deserted corridors of Gotham General. The sick and wounded had been the first evacuated from the city, their doctors with them.

Except for the two voices that carried out into the hall, one an anguished cry to save the arm and the other a dry comment about the effectiveness of a surgeon with a gaping skull.

When Selina made her entrance, a mild-faced man in his mid-forties looked at her over the semi-automatic jammed against his teeth and said, "The candy striper's here to see you."

Half a second later, the doctor and Selina were both ducking erratic fire. Selina swept the gurney out from under Barsard and followed the sound of bones crunching with the cock of her pistol. She'd reactivated the safety, but Barsard was too delirious to notice. He looked into the barrel of her gun with crazed anticipation. She could give him exactly what he seemed to want, and the world would be better off.

Selina sighed as she cold-clocked Barsard. On her headset, she put out the signal to Gordon and went about scavenging.

The doctor crawled out from under the counter while disassembling Barsard's rifle. Off her quick look, he explained, "Combat surgeon."

Assessing the knife Barsard had strapped to his shoulder, Selina added it to her belt. To the doctor, she said, "You're welcome to his arm before the Feds claim the rest of him."

"I have more deserving patients to attend to," was the doctor's stiff reply. Selina read his name off his tag. Dr. Lennon, white coat splattered with blood fresh and dry, was every bit the exhausted Gotham do-gooder currently in vogue. As he left, an odd sort of reluctance about him, he said, "I am doing my best."

"Aren't we all," Selina murmured to the empty room, standing from her crouch.

Her eyes were locked on the bracelet that had been secured in Barsard's inside jacket pocket. The sturdy wood had a coiled design and weathered pattern. On each end was the head of a snake, eyeing itself. Selina knew, as sure as she was stealing it, that the bracelet had belonged to the woman created to be chosen. 'Miranda Tate,' heir to the League of Shadows. Snakes the grass.

The bracelet cut into her fingers when her hand was seized by a leather glove. Into her ear, a hoarse voice said, "Your best is still a thief?"

Rage at the poor imitation fueled her response as she slammed him into the floor. "I thought I already taught you a lesson about sneaking up on me," she said, ripping off his balaclava.

Detective Robin John Blake righted himself and the gurney. "I wasn't sneaking. I came to borrow him." He picked up Barsard under the elbows and indicated that he wanted Selina to get the feet.

She took a seat on the counter to watch Blake struggle in comfort. "While I admire your persistence in pissing off the Feds, what're you gonna do? Torture him?" She smirked at her own suggestion. "Anyway, he's a fanatic. He won't talk."

Proud of himself, Blake said, "I already found out he's part of something called the – " He hauled Barsard onto the bed with considerable effort and grunted, "Shadow League."

Selina bit back the fear that name had come to inspire in her. "Also known as the 'Out of Your' League."

Strapping Barsard to the table, Blake said, "Look, I know I'm not him. I can't even touch him." His hand waved away the very idea. "But they're all acting like this is the last terrible thing that'll ever happen to Gotham. Maybe they need to think that way to keep sane, I don't know. But this city needs someone to be ready."

The sour look Selina was fixing him with didn't wipe the earnest off his face, so she said, "You think this city needs another dead hero? There is no 'ready' when it comes to these guys. Not even for him."

Blake would have had to be blind, deaf, and dumb to miss the way she choked at the end. "You and him," he said, placing significance where there hadn't been time and drawing what should have been the inevitable conclusion. "You two were…" Blake ducked his chin, some internal Boy Scout code not allowing him to finish that sentence.

He had no idea how right he was not to.

"Oh, dear." Selina rearranged her legs. "You're blushing."

Blake shrugged. "I just figured he had to have meant something to you, or you wouldn't be doing all this." When he started wheeling Barsard away, he didn't bother asking her to get the door for him. "No offense, but you're not the type."

Selina didn't answer his smile, but she was grateful that somebody around here appreciated that.

The legacy of the Batman, she thought as she hid away his cycle and traded in her catsuit for head-to-heel Prada. The power of a Bruce Wayne guilt-trip, she was thinking when she redistributed stockpiled goods by day and rid the streets of the insane by night.

He'd given her a clean slate, knowing even before she did that she'd stick around to earn it.

* * *

Heel tapping a propped briefcase, Selina made a show of her impatience. She examined her diamond-studded modern art piece of a wristwatch. It was useless for telling the time, but it did draw the squint-eyed ire of the harried woman making Selina's afternoon. Too bad there wasn't a casual way to flaunt an inscription.

She sent a bland smile across the damaged coffee table. "Mrs. Earle, I do hope this delay isn't a sign of noncompliance."

Kathleen Coats-Earle, she of the relentless 'take back our streets' persecutions, continued to read over the itemized list of charges she and her family had accrued over five months of shelter in Selina's neighborhood. After hemming and hawing and readjusting last season's blazer, now a size too small, Mrs. Earle put down the document and picked up her saucer of tea. "I honestly don't believe your firm has much of a case."

"I think you'll find that many in your social circle shared that opinion." Selina sat forward, her chin angled down and fingers clasped together. "They changed their minds when they understood how vigorously I'm prepared to defend the people I represent."

Mrs. Earle retained her haughty demeanor longer than most, but she, too, was unsettled by a glimpse of something feral behind the eyes of a polished young woman. She shifted against temporary upholstery. "This is blatant discrimination." When she sniffed, her leathery skin flapped. "I don't expect to collect rent from the thugs who dragged us from our home."

Placing the open briefcase on the coffee table, Selina laid on sympathy as thick as she pleased: "Life can be so unfair." She walked out of the once-luxury apartment loaded down with cash, a smirking modern day Robin Hood in a truly fantastic pantsuit.

If only he could see her now. He'd be insufferable.

To distract herself while she waited for the elevator, she texted an account of the bulldog to amuse Jen. Selina had almost pushed Bruce to his usual place in the middle of her mind when the doors opened on one of the last people to have seen them together. One of the few who ever had.

Lucius Fox, his arm in a sling, looked as if he'd aged ten years in ten days. He didn't spare Selina a glance when she came in. She stood in silence, not knowing if she wanted to be recognized not.

A noise from her phone made the decision, drawing Fox's attention. After the smallest of double takes, he took off his hat for her. "Forgive me. We were never properly introduced."

Selina skipped the obvious condolences, saying, "I heard the Feds were on you pretty hard."

"I'd have more success pleading ignorance of embezzlement," Fox agreed. "But no matter."

Frowning, she said, "What if they bring charges?"

"Oh, no. The worst they could do is pressure me into early retirement."

"Your job is worth his secret? He's not in a position to mind."

"Ours is a circle of trust," Fox replied, looking at her like he wondered if she belonged in it. "You seem to be suggesting that he in some way let us down." Hat back on, he said, "I can assure you, it was the other way around."

Selina was left behind in the elevator with polite regards and sinking claustrophobia.

* * *

_—Gotham City, April 2016—_

* * *

When Selina sat on the fire escape of her Old Town walkup on the morning the paper announced a small, private burial at an undisclosed time for eccentric recluse and terror victim Bruce Wayne, she could think of nothing but how little time they'd had together in contrast to their vast potential.

Never had she been more amused than when she was perched right here, sipping tea and watching a former billionaire haggle a low-rent cab driver over a fifty-dollar fare while the profits from his Lamborghini were sewn into the lining of her suitcase.

'My husband will be taking a cab home' – as far as lines went, right up there with, 'My mother warned me about getting into cars with strange men.' She'd been so smug. A cat who thought she had two rodents cornered. Their game could have lasted years. Should have.

Would have, she knew in her bones, had she not given in when Bane's thugs came calling. She wondered if she would have done any different if she'd known that she'd be selling the soul of the fat-rat billionaire along with the bat.

Even dripping tears onto a crumpled newspaper, Selina knew she wouldn't have. She needed that guilt, those five months of regret. She was a better person for them. They all were.

And he was better than any of them, and the worst of all of them. A martyr.

'A recluse in later years, Wayne made his last public appearance at the charity ball of elusive Enterprises board member Miranda Tate, still listed among the missing.' Adjacent to all those lies was a moment of truth captured in black and white. The caption: 'Wayne, seen here dancing with an unknown masked woman.' His eyes forever on her lips.

Selina tore their photograph in half, then shredded the article. Jen, who had never seen her so pathetic outside of a con, hovered on the edge of her breakdown. She hid her worried expression behind a memorable book with a gleaming cover.

"It wasn't supposed to end this way," Selina explained, letting the shredded paper fly off her fingers into the wind. They weren't – he wasn't – supposed to end this way.

Jen squeaked her throat clean, making new tears gather on Selina's eyelashes in anticipation. Like Holly before her, the dumb kid imagined herself a red light district philosopher. But goddamn if Selina didn't love the Robinson sisters for it.

"'The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak as if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, heart to heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, else so wide apart and differing, have come together on the dark highway, to repair home together, and to rest in her bosom.'"

Tears streamed down Selina's naked face as Jen continued to read the story of Sydney Carton and the seamstress girl he meets on his way to death.

"'Am I to kiss you now? Is the moment come?' 'Yes.' She kisses his lips; he kisses hers; they solemnly bless each other. The spare hand does not tremble as he releases it; nothing worse than a sweet, bright constancy is in the patient face.'" Hers isn't the pure love of the girl he loses to the man he thinks more worthy, but she is his last taste of a passion separate from his surrender. And that has to mean enough.

Selina stood and held out her hand to lead Jen to the living room where her suitcase was ready for the driver waiting downstairs.

She produced her most ostentatious piece, her emergency cash cow. Jen's eyes almost rolled into the back of her head when Selina placed the tiara on her head.

"Swap me," she said, and put the book in a black nylon bag.

Jen, one hand stroking diamonds, chewed on her lip as she watched Selina zip up her small suitcase. "'Is the moment come?'" she asked as Selina approached the door.

Selina put on a smile. Ruffled Jen's fluffy blonde hair, swatted her tight little ass, and gave her a long kiss on the forehead.

"I don't want to come back here and see you on the streets, princess," Selina warned Jen.

By twenty-one, Selina had been taking care of herself for five years. Jen had proven more rooted in Gotham than her sister. She had people in her life worth keeping out of trouble for, if the rules Selina had tried to teach didn't stick.

"Penthouses all the way down." Jen crossed her heart. An innocent pantomime of the threat eagle-eyed Barsad had made toward her before Selina came up with her plan to betray Gotham's Dark Knight.

Outside, Selina gave the driver her suitcase and an address to pick her up from later. Jen waved her last goodbye from the balcony.

* * *

In her defense, the back entrance was wide open. How could a girl resist?

Selina, mask in place, stood up from the cycle as the breeze she brought inside settled. Stray papers twirled down to the cracked marble floor of the Gotham City Police Department headquarters.

"Is the Commissioner in?" Selina mewled at the gaping men and women in blue.

Gordon had his head out of his office door before anyone could respond.

She kicked her leg over and strode toward him, carrying her small black bag. "A word?" she asked, and he ushered her into his office. Selina took a seat, crossing her thigh-high leather boots. "I hope I didn't scuff your floors."

Finding his voice, Gordon said, "Lucius will be happy you brought it back at all." He pulled open a file cabinet, producing the thick mass of papers she came for. "I was going to bring this to the burial."

"And just what are you burying?" she replied, her tone too raw. No doubt now was the time to leave. She was weary of giving herself away. She snatched the file and riffled through.

"It's all there. No more hard copies in this office. I take whatever it was, the virus – it worked?"

"It will." She snapped the folder closed and placed it in the bag. She was about to pull out Jen's book when Selina's overtired brain registered what was on Gordon's desk. She side-eyed the dog-earned pages.

"Are you interested in the classics, Ms. Kyle? I've had mine for years, but someone had ten thousand new copies delivered to City Hall. We've been handing these out in the street. Inspirational literature, of a sort."

Of course. Jen couldn't be the only one to make the Dickensian connections, just as Selina couldn't be the only one to see herself in its pages.

Gordon lifted his copy to show her the highlighted portions. "Have you read it? For the eulogy…what do you think?"

Her eyes dodged the words on the page like she was ducking a punch. She held out her gloved hand. "Pleasure doing business with you, Commissioner."

He stepped toward her to squeeze it. "Will you accept a thank you? Or are you like him in that regard, too?"

"Oh, we couldn't be more different," she said, hoping the batting of her lashes distracted him from the trembling in her hand. "I accept thanks. I expect repayment."

"Ms. Kyle, you're a free woman. At least as far as this city is concerned."

"So I walk out of Gotham today." The regret she felt was mistrust, had to be. There was nothing left for her here. She was deluding herself if she thought there ever could have been.

"I suppose I could help you stage your death. But you'll forgive me if I've lost my taste for such things."

Selina slid her arm out of his grip. Anger was burning in her eyes, so she cast them to the floor. She'd never believed in Harvey Dent. The feeling of betrayal was on behalf of another party. Eight years of a life cut short thrown away on a lie.

As Gordon opened the door for her, he said, "I'd say, 'You're welcome in Gotham any time,' but we both know that comes with a caveat."

Pouting, Selina ran her thumb along Gordon's mustache. "Oh, that hurts. My love for you is unconditional."

"Well, uh…" He leaned in. "Could you maybe not make a scene? I'm trying to patch things up with my wife."

"You'll want her to hear about this." Selina pulled him down by the tie to leave a lingering kiss on the side of his mouth. "Trust me."

His hand went to the lipstick smudge as she sashayed to the front entrance. Not one police officer or detective lifted a finger to stop her. The night she delivered the infamous Scarecrow in a burlap sack must have left an impression.

Selina was almost home free when a tearing sound preceded a pink slip of paper thrust in her face. She held it between two fingers. A parking ticket with a phone number on the back.

"Clever boy," she said, and tucked the red-faced officer's ticket into the belt slung low on her hips.

Catcalls followed her down the steps. A female voice yelled out, "Hate to see you go but love to watch you leave!" An older man called, "At least tell us who you are," and a younger one replied, "She's the Catwoman!" Laughter swelled in the broken hall of the GCPD. The clever boy got the last word: "Call me?" Always leave them wanting more.

Hell of an exit, she thought as she slid into the back of the black town car waiting for her at the curb. Hell of a goodbye to Gotham City.

But not to Selina Kyle, not yet. One more stop.

She had one of her thigh-high boots slipped off before an eyebrow raise at the heavyset driver made sure the opaque glass clicked closed between them.

* * *

When all the luxury homes on the island had been claimed by the people, the greatest of them had stood across the river a fortress on manicured lawns. Wayne Manor was untouched, as pristine and vacant as a mausoleum.

Long hallways echoed under her footfalls. Selina had grown up with rumors that the mansion was haunted, and she believed them now. She could hear the low moans coming from the Regency Room.

She slipped away from the sound, into the master suite. She went right for the safe.

Just as she'd done that night all those months ago, when she hadn't been able to resist letting the pearls dangle in the light. They'd been a gift. 'To my Martha from her Thomas,' said the note tucked with delicate precision into a velvet box. Even without the note, Selina had been able to tell by the shape of them that they were not payment for services rendered or apologies accepted. They'd been a gift in the truest sense, given with love. They'd been cold when she wrapped them around her neck, but she'd imagined a hand warming them.

The safe was empty now, the pearls gone.

Selina unwound from her crouch and paced the length of Bruce Wayne's oriental rug. Those hands had taken the pearls from her neck, the warmth of them never touched her skin. His mother's pearls. She'd presumed to deserve them a second time. Wrong again.

On his mantel, a photograph Selina had seen before shared a new frame with a photograph torn from the headlines. She ran her fingertips over the faces of his Charles Darnay, his Lucie Manette. They overlooked his room as if from an altar.

She turned away from them, toward the place she met him. Along the frayed edges of the target, Selina traced the hole the arrow left where it sunk in inches from her nose. Her mouth curved at the memory. What an introduction.

The door creaked behind her, and she turned to watch well-kept leather shoes approach. His suit was the same mourning black as her dress. When he said nothing, she darted a glance at the butler's face. He was as drained of color as Bruce had been, before a cat burglar had brought the blood rushing to his skin.

Alfred Pennyworth turned his red-rimmed eyes toward the safe. He said nothing to her.

Selina never felt more like an intruder. With no mask to hide her face, she ducked her chin as she walked out.

She was almost out of the room when Alfred said, "I heard you were with him at the end." Through the crack in his voice, he said, "As much as he'd let anyone be."

"I asked him to leave," she said against the doorframe. "I meant to myself."

"But you didn't. You didn't leave him." The old man's breath caught. "Godspeed, Ms. Kyle."

"Goodbye," she said to Alfred, to the room. To Bruce Wayne and his Batman.

Inside her pocket, her hand closed around the Clean Slate he'd promised her. On her way to the Gotham airport, she held it like her mother gripped a rosary.

The black town car slipped into the darkness of the Midtown tunnel. But Selina, with her eyes closed tight, could only see white. A blinding light.

* * *

_—Gotham City, September 2016—_

* * *

Colors bloom and fade as the pressure of his fingertips lift from the soft skin of her eyelids. A spectrum kaleidoscopes around his face as her eyes adjust to the darkness.

Her name, like a breath: "Selina." He whispers, "What do you see?"

"I see…" She lets her nails trail his gentle face. Flashes teeth as a thought occurs to her. "I see a man who wrote his own eulogy. Wherever did you find ten thousand copies of  _A Tale of Two Cities_ , Bruce?"

"They were for Alfred," he admits. "Mainly. A hint."

"They were also Batman's last words to inspire Gotham. 'I see a city…'"

He lifts his chin, and she wonders how bright the lights of Gotham shine in from that window. "'I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through the long long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.'"

"'Long long years,'" she quotes back at him, drawing his eyes down to her. "Gotham still needs time. And Batman still needs a break from retirement, now and again." She holds her hand over his face. "Even if he won't be donning any masks."

Bruce pulls down her hand to kiss the center of her palm. "Who's retired? No one in this room."

Selina arches back to take in the deep shadows of the only aboveground part of the Martha and Thomas Wayne Home for Children to be kept closed. The East Wing of Wayne Manor.

In a fluid motion, Selina rolls Bruce onto his back to reclaim her favorite perch. "Close your eyes, Master Wayne." She drums her fingertips over his eyelids. "What do you see?"

"Lights. Colors."

"I see 'a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.'" She curls her fingers through the light silver patches at his temples. "I see a long life worth having, because of you."

Bruce smiles, and she knows she's found his right answer. He sits up to kiss her face, left to right. "These eyes see what mine do."

"Mine see better," she purrs, shoving him down.

"Selina." There's a warning in his voice.

"Bruce." A challenge accepted.

Not long before her vision illuminates with every color shining from his eyes.

* * *

_— Florence + the Machine —_

* * *

_Say my name, and every color illuminates_

_We are shining, and we'll never be afraid again_

_Say my name, we are shining, say my name_

_Say my name and we will never be afraid again_

* * *

__For extras related to this chapter, visit **thatcraftykid-spectrum dot tumblr dot com**  and click the 1. LET THE SPECTRUM IN tag._  
_

_Disclaimer: **"You're not my original work. You're practice."**  All rights to Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros. Studios, and DC Comics. No infringement intended._


	2. NOT CALLING YOU A GHOST

**  
SPECTRUM**

_**a Catwoman Continuation** _

**by thatcraftykid**

* * *

**2\. NOT CALLING YOU A GHOST**

* * *

_—Florence + the Machine—_

* * *

_I'm not calling you a liar, just don't lie to me_

_I'm not calling you a thief, just don't steal from me_

_I'm not calling you a ghost, just stop haunting me_

_And I love you so much, I'm gonna let you kill me_

* * *

_—Gotham City, April 2016—_

* * *

The flash drive opened with a sound like a switchblade. Selina stared at the USB, letting the receding backdrop of Gotham City blur in and out of focus, before she clicked it into the port on her ultra thin tablet.

Black took over her screen, followed by a rapid string of code that gave way to the logo of Rykin Data. A curser blinked in a box titled 'Name.' Under that, 'Date of Birth,' 'Social Security Number.' And a button marked 'Delete.' All records – anything with her name, her face, her prints – gone. Nothing left but a ghost in the machine.

'A little too good to be true.'

Daggett's taunt still had weight enough to compress her chest. Desperation had forced her to believe in the software. As careful as she'd thought she'd been in her research, 'too good to be true' sounded more like life.

Her life, anyway. Not Bruce Wayne's.

Somehow, he'd done what no one at Daggett Industries had been able to do. He'd made the Clean Slate work. And now Selina was in sole possession of a tool so invaluable it had been elevated to gangland myth long before proof of concept.

That many would kill for this technology went without saying. Its power was as tantalizing as forbidden fruit.

* * *

  _—Gotham City, March 2016 —_  


* * *

Selina's teeth sunk into the apple in a motion as smooth as when she'd sunk the switchblade into that punk's left ass cheek.

She savored the sweet taste on her tongue. Any of the millions of dollars worth of jewelry and electronics carelessly paraded through the streets of Gotham could be hers with minimal effort, but none of them would be riches enough to buy her a juicy red apple like the one in her hand.

The kid she saved from those low-level street thugs stared up at her, in his eyes a tiny flame of hope that even this endless winter hadn't managed to snuff out. She lobbed the apple back at him, and he took off like a shot.

At least he'd listened – 'Never steal from somebody you can't outrun.' Selina had no will to run, not these days.

"Pretty generous for a thief."

The apple lodged in her throat. She had to force it down, along with a half-dozen emotions from exhilaration to terror.

She spun around to see Bruce Wayne coming out of the shadows. With every step, she heard the echo of that horrific crack. Even as he strode toward her with nothing but strength of purpose, all she saw was the broken man she'd led to slaughter.

The last words he'd spoken to her: 'You've made a serious mistake.' In her guilt, she saw a vengeful ghost and prepared to deflect his earned contempt.

"You came back," she said, like it didn't matter. "I thought they'd killed you." Like she hadn't cared.

"Not yet."

She bristled. Glib was her weapon. "If you're expecting an apology – "

"It wouldn't suit you," he said. Then he asked for her help. Like her betrayal meant nothing. Maybe it hadn't.

Five months of self-torture dampened her indignation. "And why would I help you?"

From his jacket pocket, he pulled out a flash drive no bigger than his thumb. "For this. The Clean Slate."

She could have thrown it in his face. No way in hell would he hand a tool as powerful as that one over to one of the criminal class he hated so much. He must have tampered with the program, rewritten it to put a big spotlight right on her.

"You're going to trust me with that? After what I did to you?" A deliberate provocation.

"I'll admit, I felt a little let down," Bruce said, holding her stare with an intensity that belied his casual tone. "But I still think there's more to you. In fact." Her ghost of vengeance turned angel of mercy twisted the knife he'd buried in her heart as he waved the flash drive. "I think that for you this isn't just a tool, it's an escape route. You want to disappear. Start fresh."

The weight of just how much she wanted exactly was closed behind the reality of a prison without walls. "Start fresh? I can't even get off this island."

"I can give you a way off," Bruce replied.

Damn him. She'd kept her head down all this time. She was good at seeing the world as it was – without hope. But he'd come back and now the warmth of it was rising inside of her.

Bruce continued, "Once you've gotten me to Lucius Fox. I need you to find out where they're holding him and take me to him."

That she already knew. The Dungeon was as infamous as ex-doctor Jonathan Crane's kangaroo court. She snatched the flash drive from his hand. "Why do you need Fox?"

"To save this city."

"Who says it needs saving?" Her sneer wasn't as strong as she would've liked. "Maybe I like it this way."

"Maybe you do," Bruce replied, calm in his utter condescension. "But tomorrow that bomb's going off."

Shock drained the blood from her face. Fear had made them all so ignorant. How else could this twisted little social experiment end but in death? All of a sudden, Bruce's Defender of Gotham routine didn't seem like such a joke. She remembered footage of the atom bomb from her short stint in public high school – light and wind and silence, forever.

"Get your 'powerful friend' on the case."

Why me? her brain was screaming. She didn't belong in a world of superheroes versus supervillains – and if she did, as a thieving con artist she had more in common with the latter than the former.

"I'm trying," he replied. "But I need Fox."

She gripped the flash drive. A clean slate and a sure escape – everything she ever wanted from a man who, by right, should be throwing her to the dogs. Instead, he was giving her hope, hot and bright.

Not even her suspicious nature could dampen the heat. She believed him. Selina Kyle believed in Bruce Wayne. What a sucker she was turning out to be.

* * *

  _—Gotham City, April 2016—_  


* * *

Selina breathed out her hesitation and started to type.

Bruce had seemed so sure of her motives – selfish, yes, self-destructive, too. But not bad. Not in the context of the true evil that had held Gotham. He'd been so sure he knew her. And, even though the person he'd decided to trust hadn't been Selina Kyle as she was, he'd somehow known it was Selina Kyle as she'd want to be, if she could start herself over from scratch.

Her finger twirled over the big button.

Bruce had proven himself too good, that much was sure, but not to be true. Too good for this world. He'd left her behind in it with the ultimate tool for adaptation.

"Here we go, Mr. Wayne," Selina murmured. "I'd never trust another man to kill me."

Her French-tipped nail tapped the touch screen and a completion bar appeared. The program moved slower than it had at beta stage, but that was encouraging. She'd be to the airport before it was finished. She'd be well off the map before any one of her enemies could put two and two together and come up with a plan to hunt her down.

Thirty minutes to wipe out thirty years.

Forcing herself not to count down the seconds, she put her death aside to focus on preparing for the afterlife she'd become so desperate to have.

* * *

_—Gotham City to Gotham City, September 2007 to March 2015—_

* * *

Panic didn't set in until her twenty-ninth birthday.

It wasn't the usual panic of getting older, being single. Selina Kyle was a fine wine, she knew she'd age well and that she deserved only the most complimentary pairing.

Hers was an unusual panic for an unusual life.

The blackmail started even before she landed on the far side of the Atlantic. She'd been twenty-two and imprisoned and so starved for a taste of life outside of Gotham that she'd sold herself for rations.

Gratitude to debt to coercion to threat. Incriminations of the photographic variety were sealed in plain manila envelopes and hand-delivered by maitre d's and flower venders who hadn't the faintest idea that theirs were minor plays in her losing game.

The blackmail came when she dipped a toe off the map, when she turned down the wrong client, when she refused a meeting. When she refused him.

She got older, she got bolder.

Paranoia had been building for quite some time, piling up as thick as the newspaper articles she was arrogant enough keep as trophies alongside high society calling cards. Detroit to Dublin, no one had made the connection.

Then an anonymous tip reported in  _The Irish Times_  made the case for a serial cat burglar accompanied by a photograph she recognized. In masked profile, but her face in print all the same. A similar story appeared in Amsterdam with a different angle. Then Berlin. By the time she saw herself in  _Le Parisien_ , she was shaken enough to chuck the newspaper off her balcony in the direction of the Eiffel Tower.

She was followed on every street corner. There were eyes on the back of her neck in every airport. Selina had no one to turn to. Too many people had tried to double-cross her over the years and she'd just loved triple-crossing them back. Upshot to all that fun – alone and cornered.

Shut up in hotel after hotel, she tore apart rumors. She took her own meetings.

In the lobby of the Grand Hotel des Palmes, Sicily, where she'd first shaken hands with the owner of her cage, she confirmed the existence of a tool deft enough to pick its lock. Flashing teeth at the dour rodent of a man who'd made the best offer of her career, she said, "I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Stryver, but I'm afraid I'm no longer accepting clients."

She set fire to the thickest envelope yet and hired herself instead.

At Rykin Data corporate headquarters in Dubai, she pulled a reverse seduction on a cocky programmer. He gave her shy-eyed, thick-framed reporter persona an exclusive on the lucrative bidding war between Daggett Industries and Wayne Enterprises over a certain Clean Slate technology. Daggett Industries lost the bid. They canceled it when they bought Rykin Data.

Selina took a redeye to the last city she wanted to come back to and the one place on earth where she still had friends. After holing up with Jen at her grandmother's on the East End for the day, Selina celebrated her homecoming the only way a woman with her record could – with a break-in.

She was about to plant a remote viewer on the Daggett Industries supercomputer when every light on the floor flickered on and John Daggett himself walked in, escorted by five armed guards.

Panic hit her like a splash of icy water. Her reflexes went numb.

She was outgunned and outsmarted. She'd been lured here, she was sure of it. She was just as sure of who had sabotaged her perfect crime, but that was a dish she'd long since left to cool.

"Do you feel the walls closing in?" Daggett asked, adding, "Ms. Kyle" for effect.

She needed movement to get her focused. She slunk toward him, finding her rhythm with every click of her heels. "Mr. Daggett, I'm flattered. But you should know I'm good in tight spaces."

"Oh, yes," he said, his eyes and every other pair in the room glued to black leather. "That's why I'd like to cut a deal with you."

"Well, you know what I want." Selina simpered, "But what itch do you need scratched?"

"Bruce Wayne."

She didn't try to hide the interest in her voice. "You want me to steal from a shut-in?" There wasn't a Gotham native alive who wasn't curious about what the former playboy got up to these days. The rumors weren't pretty.

"Not right away. There are…events to be set in motion. Stay in within the city limits until the fall, and I'll assure that you aren't bothered by even your most persistent admirers." Daggett's beady eyes followed the curve of her body. "But try not to draw attention to yourself in the meantime."

She adopted her most innocent expression. "Who? Me?"

Her first theft shared an inside page of  _The Gotham Times_  with the death of a prominent nuclear physicist killed in a plane crash over Uzbekistan. Her second and third went unreported in light of incriminating photographs.

It was going to be one hell of a summer. The best of times, the worst of times. Her swan song to a city that chewed up a hundred little girls a day and spit out them out criminals.

* * *

  _—Gotham City, April 2016—_  


* * *

At the departures gate of Gotham airport, a tousle-haired girl wrapped in a pink trench coat taken off a smoldering department store clearance rack emerged from the black town car.

Standing to the side, she held a hundred dollar bill up to the crack in the driver's window and told him to pop the trunk. "I can handle it from here," she said over the noise of some testosterone-fueled game of man-on-man grab-ass blasting from his earpiece.

The driver compressed his double chins as a nod, telling her, "Don't doubt you, sweetheart," in a thick East End accent.

Selina might have shed those classless tones like she had an orange jumpsuit, but she remembered what blackmail sounded like in them. She added another hundred, as expected. Greedy bastards they were, ex-mob drivers at least could be counted on for out-of-sight out-of-mind.

Rolling her suitcase through the rotating door, Selina adopted a slouch under her backpack. She let her cheap faux leather flats smack against tiles as she made her way to the ticket line.

Out of the corner of her eye, she peered around at the national guard standing at lock-kneed attention in various locations. Selina took a moment to appreciate the boys and girls in uniform. Seven thousand troops did look awfully good on the twenty-four-hour news cycle. There'd be more, if the interim mayor hadn't put her foot down – Gotham took care of Gotham.

Never mind the months it spent tearing itself apart.

God, this city. She'd tried to leave it over and over again. It was more than time to finally shake it.

The sound of frustrated entitlement pulled Selina's attention to the salt-and-pepper suit in front of her in line. "I paid for the tickets before the card was stolen!" His trophy wife – who looked to be the actual age Selina was affecting with bad posture – chewed on ragged nails as she stared into middle distance.

Selina averted her eyes, realizing that a pretty, broken thing like that must have lost a lot more than a credit card to the Storm.

The woman behind the counter seemed numb to the suit's abuse, even though the airport had only just reopened. "As I told you, sir, until all investigations of fraud are concluded, the airline cannot honor payment for tickets purchased during the Siege."

"Oh, that's a great way to get a business back on track!" the suit yelled. "Who the hell brings that much cash to an airport?"

As hands went up behind her, Selina added her index finger to the poll. "It was on the news," she offered in her meekest voice.

The ticket agent let a smile slip. "Next!"

Selina reached into her knock-off purse, noting less than a minute remaining on the Rykin countdown.

To the ticket agent, she handed over the altered passport of one Jennifer Kay Robinson. It was a risk, considering the ties, but Selina couldn't afford to craft a permanent alias until she was well clear of Gotham.

"Any checked luggage?"

"Nope." Never.

After typing in the name, the agent said, "Ms. Robinson, the next available flight to Zurich is in two hours."

"Zurich?"

"According to our records, Mr. Bruce Wayne – " The ticket agent eyed who she thought was a twenty-one-year-old with frizzy hair and cheap clothing, not buying any legitimate connection to the late Prince of Gotham " – purchased an open one-way ticket to Zurich in your name."

"When?" she asked, fighting to keep down the perverse hope that shot through her.

"Looks like several days before the Siege." Skepticism remained on the agent's face, even as she said, "Payment has not been contested," and began to print the boarding pass.

Selina leaned into the counter to reorient herself to reality. This wasn't the work of the Bruce who'd trusted her. He was gone.

"I'm supposed to meet a friend." She chose another name, her most outrageous. "Kitka Harlow?"

"Same reservation," the agent confirmed.

Of course. The Bruce who hadn't trusted her had somehow tracked down her aliases and used them to send her a message. Switzerland was the place that neutral cowards slunk off to when they refused to fight. And he'd been right about her. She had tried to run, only she'd bought her own ticket straight to Blackgate Prison.

A faint noise sounded from her purse. Task complete.

"And – is there a reservation for Kyle? Selina." She couldn't resist getting an angle on the computer screen.

"No record."

Blank. A clean slate.

A hollow victory, but a victory just the same. Selina smiled. "Forget it," she said, and held out an unburdened hand for her boarding pass.

The ticket agent relinquished the pass with a flip, "I'm sorry for your loss." Couldn't blame her, 'Jennifer Robinson' must sound like she was part of some high-end prostitution ring.

So Selina didn't surprise the woman when she replied, "I hardly knew him." But she did surprise herself, every time, with the depth of how much she regretted that.

* * *

_—Gotham City, September 1985 to March 1999—_

* * *

Every citizen of Gotham grew up knowing two names – Wayne and Falcone. Geography determined popular opinion, but only to a degree. Carmine Falcone was a crook no matter how many paydays he arranged. And, even if his charity balls kept the GCPD limping on, Thomas Wayne was a paragon.

Gotham changed with his death. Selina knew that because any story about the old days ended with, 'But that was before the Waynes got shot.' By the time Selina was old enough to do the math, she already knew that meant just before she was born.

Selina was a child of new Gotham. A better economy and a more interested elite didn't spell an end to crime, just a ghettoizing of it. In the Narrows, criminals flourished stacked up on top of each other. Of the tenement her family had been driven into, the bottom half was a brothel. Her rooftop was a drug drop.

There was no Thomas Wayne in new Gotham, only a boy who always kept his head down to the cameras when accepting honors on his late father's behalf.

She studied him when he was on their busted TV. To her young mind, his face was what special looked like. She thought special was something she could mimic.

That quiet boy grew into an angry adolescent who shoved camera lenses and cussed at reporters in the most awkward displays of teen angst ever documented.

They made her mother's poor excuse for a second husband chuckle and take a swipe at Selina. "All that breeding and the little shit turned out as common as a stray like you." 'Uncle' Ted's insult made her smile inside. The Prince of Gotham like her. Wouldn't that be something?

He turned eighteen and page six exploded with pictures of him, face obscured by the brim of a baseball cap, cutting classes under headlines like 'The Future of Wayne Enterprises?' The next day's caption might be something like 'No Business as Usual,' complete with photos of Bruce wandering some European city with just a camera slung around his neck for company.

The tabloid Selina always remembered was from a place she couldn't pronounce on a sunlit sea that shone a color she'd only seen once, when her mother had brought home a sapphire from the club and Uncle Ted had given her a bruise to match.

It was her favorite because it had a series of shots of Bruce shucking his shirt as he ran at full speed toward the edge of a cliff. When he dove off, his body sliced through the air and attacked the water with a terrifying, absolute freedom from what Selina feared most.

Her sister snuck up on her pouring over those pictures and tried to grab the newspaper from her, but Selina was too quick as usual. She leapt up on the windowsill to hold it out of reach.

Magdalene just sighed with her usual piety – "Even your imaginary boyfriend is stuck-up" – and went back to ignoring everyone in the cramped apartment.

Flushed, Selina didn't have time to hide the paper before her mother appeared, rearranging her tattered bathrobe so she could join her on the windowsill. "Aw, mon petite chat. I like your boyfriend."

Selina was ready to flinch, but what came next wasn't a joke at her expense.

"He should be so lucky," her mother said, and scratched her behind the ear. It was one of the last of Maria Kyle's good days.

Bruce got better at avoiding the paparazzi. But, even if it was months old, when Selina climbed the rusted fence behind her middle school, she still had his latest exploit tucked into her backpack for inspiration.

She thought she was making good money scurrying along rooftops as a lookout. She thought by high school at the latest she could afford to cut school in equal style.

But strays like her didn't work for the mob at a profit. The Kyle family owed debt.

Without Thomas Wayne, without an heir to take his place in the moral center, all of Gotham owed debt to Carmine Falcone. Falcone ran the town polite society pretended was still the one Wayne almost emptied his son's trust fund saving. Their blindness was not ignorance but fear. Gotham hadn't been saved by Thomas Wayne. Thomas Wayne had been murdered by Gotham.

To keep the city savage, Falcone avenged his death with an assassination that rocked from the courthouse to the Clip Joint. Hazel had been the one whose debt had been up, but any of the women dabbing at their painted faces in the back of the club might have delivered Falcone's farewell message to Joe Chill.

Selina watched powder fly from a compact clutched between her mother's shaking hands.

New Hazel came in primping her bleached hair with steady fingers, telling everybody they'd never guess who just sat down across from the man himself.

The women crowded into the security office to view the live feed, Selina slipping her way to the front. Falcone, gun out in full view of cops and judges alike, delivered a lesson about the power of fear that couldn't be bought and a side of life made uglier by the night the Waynes got shot. He'd never tasted the desperation Selina could never rinse from her mouth.

"You'd have to go a thousand miles to meet somebody who didn't know your name," Falcone lectured the stone-still Prince of Gotham. "So don't come down here with your anger, trying to prove something to yourself. This is a world you'll never understand. And you always fear what you don't understand."

The crack of the first punch didn't even make her blink. All too well, she knew the wall of fear people from his world put up to keep hers separate.

From a broken down fire escape, Selina Kyle watched Bruce Wayne put on a homeless man's coat and disappear into the black night of Gotham City. She was thirteen, and she'd already begun to lose hope of ever shaking it.

She'd have sold anything for his ability to vanish.

* * *

_—Gotham City, April 2016—_

* * *

Seated at her gate, Selina typed her full name into the browser. The search engine assumed she meant the Taiwanese pop star. 'Cat Burglar Dublin 2015' brought up a story four years old about the wife of a British MP breaking into the home of his mistress and stealing her kitten.

Hacking the GCPD was a simple task with the Commissioner's passwords. Sweeter words were never written – 'No Match.'

Selina Kyle still existed in print, the Clean Slate was technology not magic. But without any records to match those photographs, head down she could be anyone – she could be herself. She examined her fingerprints. They were part of her body again, not patterns that could betray her.

She closed the browser, intending to trade the tablet for the book that every few people in the terminal held open. Then she noticed some were crying. Quite enough of that, Selina said to emotional vulnerability and let  _A Tale of Two Cities_  fall from her hand.

When she looked back at the tablet, the logo of Wayne Enterprises was bouncing on the screen. She put her finger on the icon, not quite sure if she wanted to open it or cover it up.

The screen of her tablet faded to black. The program, whatever it was, wanted a password a pointless three letters long. B-A-T flashed red, so she traded the first letter for a C.

She was prompted to enter a ticket number.

Gripping her boarding pass so tight she left an indent with her thumb, Selina typed in the long string of numbers.

What came out were photographic directions to a cabin nestled in the mountains of St. Moritz.

A ghost in the machine, logic screamed at the rising hope.

Its heat burned in her legs as she walked down the jet bridge to file into her first class seat. The chair next to her remained empty at takeoff.

Its heat burned in her lungs as she sighed into sleep, dreaming of falling at feet that emerge from shadows.

When she woke up, her knees ached and a different kind of fire burned in her roiling gut and flashing eyes. Selina Kyle had a new life, but she was starting it off the same way she'd begun the one she left behind –

Haunted by a past she had no control over. And pissed right the hell off.

* * *

_—Florence + the Machine—_

* * *

_There's a ghost in my lungs and it sighs in my sleep_

_Wraps itself around my tongue as it softly speaks_

_Then it walks, then it walks with my legs_

_To fall, to fall, to fall at your feet_

* * *

__For extras related to this chapter, visit **thatcraftykid-spectrum dot tumblr dot com**  and click the 2. NOT CALLING YOU A GHOST tag._  
_

_Disclaimer: **"You're not my original work. You're practice."**  All rights to Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros. Studios, and DC Comics. No infringement intended._


	3. YOU LEFT ME IN THE DARK

**SPECTRUM**

_**a Catwoman Continuation** _

**by thatcraftykid**

* * *

**3\. YOU LEFT ME IN THE DARK**

* * *

_—Florence + the Machine—_

* * *

_A falling star fell from your heart and landed in my eyes_

_I screamed aloud as it tore through them and now it's left me blind_

_The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out_

_You left me in the dark – no dawn, no day_

_I'm always in this twilight, in the shadow of your heart_

_And in the dark I can hear your heartbeat, I tried to find the sound_

_But then it stopped and I was in the darkness, so darkness I became_

* * *

_—St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

Dusk settled on roads narrower by the mile. Her foot, strapped into a Gianmarco Lorenzi heel, only got heavier. At breakneck speed, Selina tested the suspension of her new two-seater.

The vintage Citroën matched the ruby lipstick she reapplied hugging steep alpine curves. Her tablet, mounted on the dashboard, kept pace as it navigated her through back roads. Persistent winter winds whipped fine blonde hair against her stinging skin.

Selina hadn't managed a deep breath since before her plane touched tarmac. A display of weakness she'd turned into a strength – added veracity for the anxiety she played up at the car dealership in Zurich. She made her impractical purchase in cash and signed a ludicrous name in shaky cursive. 'Grace Monroe,' ringlets locked in a white scarf and face obscured by oversized sunglasses, had every tick of a spoiled skittish wife stepping out on a strong-arm husband. Not an unusual sight this close to a favored ski destination of the rich and useless.

With Zurich hours behind and St. Moritz a thousand feet below, Selina had no one left to fool but her own reflection. The flush in her cheeks was anger, she chose to believe, and she had every right to the feeling. She'd earned her clean slate, but Bruce had never intended her a clean break. Not from him.

Why?

A lifetime of exposure to coercive men should have satisfied that nagging question. Except it couldn't.

Because of all men it was that man. Because the son of a bitch made her hope.

* * *

_—Gotham City, March 2016—_

* * *

Selina rolled the promise of a better quality life in her fist as she led Bruce through the streets of Old Town. He lagged a few steps behind, but a glance told her his eyes weren't on her ass – not to enjoy the view or to make sure she didn't split. He was taking in the sight of his Storm-swept city.

His dull surprise sparked her gallows humor. Selina wasn't one to waste precious hours of her life, even without the motivation of imminent doom. "I take it the view from the Palisades didn't prepare you for this." She opened her arms wide. "Some party, huh?"

"I've never seen Gotham so empty."

Empty. The precise feeling that gnawed away at her. Selina let her face fall because Bruce couldn't see it.

Ahead, a door opened. Over the warped sound of Huey Lewis and the News, a bottle thunked against the sidewalk. A titan of the Gotham Stock Exchange stumbled out of a looted 7-Eleven turned liquor refuge.

Selina, knowing what was coming, wrinkled her nose at the stink of wallowing misery.

"Hey – hey, Kitty!" Horace Gladstone flashed open his frayed coat on sock garters, threadbare boxers, and red suspenders nestled in wiry chest hair. He slurred, "The wife's still out of town. I could let you bat me around a little – " His miming wrenched him forward.

While Selina took a dignified step out of his way, Bruce moved in to catch the pathetic lump by his elbows before his knees connected with broken glass.

He held him up against the dented steel gate. "Mr. Gladstone?" When there was no intelligible response, Bruce said to Selina, "We can't let him pass out like this."

Lip curled at the overplayed do-gooder act, Selina replied, "Look at him, he's spent the last hundred and fifty days passing out like this."

If Bruce would have fixed her with one of his level-chinned moral guardian stares, she'd have walked away from him on sight. Instead, he gave her an open-palmed gesture of helpless obligation. "He knew my father."

With an impatient sigh, Selina pushed in to slap Horace across his thick, ruddy face. Eyes focused again, he cradled his cheek like his fondest memory.

"Dino!" she called into the 7-Eleven. "Horace, tell Mr. Wayne you'll be fine."

"Wayne?" he grumbled, struggling to stand under his own power. "It's my turn to cut in."

Bruce watching, Selina took the diamonds from her ears. Dino Ciabatti, just turned fifteen, emerged from the building and she placed the earrings in his cupped palm. "Make sure your mother keeps this one on the beds list. And you better ease up on the alcohol – the faster you pour, the quicker all the promises of these trust fund assholes get sucked down the drain."

The boy's afroed head bobbed. "Moms is making them write it out official." Earrings in his pocket, he slung Horace's arm around his shoulder and directed the old man back inside.

"Take care, Mr. Gladstone," Bruce said after him.

Horace muttered something that sounded a lot like, "Go back to your panic room, you twit." His tone took on that amiable cluelessness that had made him an ideal mark as he said to Dino, "You know, my wife has a similar pair of earrings. If those savages haven't stolen them by now."

Selina walked backward to better display her smirk. "Satisfied?"

"Very informative." Bruce followed, hands in his pockets and eyebrows up. "Robin Hood."

"War lord," she amended. "This is my neighborhood. Now populated by the mighty fallen and the decent people who stayed behind to rack up the IOUs. Everybody gets what's coming to them."

They went around the back of her building. Selina swung herself up the sawed-off ladder to her fire escape. Bruce joined her with a series of pull-ups he made look effortless.

Gesturing him inside, she moved in close to slide his frayed work coat from broadened shoulders. She circled an appreciative look over his solid upper body.

"Well, aren't you rejuvenated." Holding his gaze, she undid her buttons. "To think, I lost all that sleep over sending you to a health spa." Selina let their coats fall onto the loveseat in a tangle. She stepped toward him.

Bruce didn't back away. "You felt guilty."

Selina gave a dainty shrug. "You could've been a lot of fun." She wanted to wind her arms around his neck. It took her a beat longer than comfortable to do so. Her, "All those long, cold winter nights," came out rushed.

The hair at the nape of his neck brushed over her tingling wrists. "An uptown property would have kept you warmer than this place. I know the Gladstone penthouse caught your eye."

She rubbed her nail over the curve of his earlobe and the goosebumps her touch brought to his neck. "The best was off the island, and I don't settle."

"You stayed here because you couldn't justify displacing anyone from their home."

Her head jerked. "I don't need to justify anything."

"Good people always do."

The weight of his stare made her tongue feel heavy. "I'm not one of your good people, Bruce."

He gripped her elbows, and she flinched at the sudden movement. An intensity like endless, exact understanding lit up his expression. "You believe that because of your anger. But it's your anger that makes you good. Can't you see that?"

Selina squirmed out of his grasp. He left her no shadows to retreat to.

* * *

_—St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

White satin fingertips, gripping a thin steering wheel, jerked the car into a lane almost invisible even head on. The occasional branch scraped paint as Selina put the pedal to the floor to gain enough traction to climb the long incline.

Even with her high beams on, the squat cabin appeared not much more than a void in the wilderness. She slammed into park.

Her ankles swayed as she stood up from the convertible. A tremble ran up her legs and through her body, coursing like the adrenaline that was never about the drive.

Selina shook her dark mass of hair from the bleached wig and traded it for her things. Suitcase bouncing on gravel, her eyes scanned the sloped outline of the cabin. Clouds rolled back from the half-moon, glinting light on windows shuttered against any clues to prepare her for what was inside.

Arrival confirmed by GPS, her tablet brought up a photograph of where to press to activate the concealed security panel and provided the twenty-digit code that unlocked the front door. A reminder that the owner of this property had secrets – and the means hide them.

Swung open, the entrance gaped like the mouth of a cavern. Its blackness enveloped Selina as she stepped inside, swallowing the echo of her heels. The weight of her things settling on uneven wood kicked up dust.

Thick, musty air constricted her lungs, stealing her breathless anticipation.

To the lifeless silence, Selina surrendered her most self-conscience hope – the phantom sounds of logs crackling in a fireplace and the intimate sibilance of champagne pouring into twin flutes. Of shattered crystal as one glass hit the floor empty and the other sizzled in flames, so that her hands would be free to force that champagne-drenched, impossible face down to hers.

Her exhale shuddered out of her on chills. One more pitiful fantasy lost to an uncertain dark.

Selina wrapped her coat tighter around her body, using the light of her tablet to navigate the large room. In reaction to her movement, it showed her a blue on black map of the three-room cabin.

An open stove and row of cabinets lined the wall at one end. A bedroom smaller than a Wayne Manor cupboard was behind the other. Coming toward the far wall, she could make out a plain piano standing next to a picture window blocked by trees.

From the tablet, three discordant sets of notes played on repeat.

A laugh bubbled out of her throat. Selina pressed satin to her mouth, afraid the sound would take a turn for the hysterical if she didn't hold it in.

Freeing her hands, she plucked the tune out on the piano. The elevated floor beneath the window hissed and pulled back.

Secret passageways, mysterious coordinates – all of it meant to be fun. Selina marveled at this revelation on her way down the stairs. Curiosity was supposed to have led her here, not coercion.

With her first step onto plush carpet, dim lights warmed the spacious hallway. At a glance, the underground level had all the luxury the upstairs lacked by design.

The depth of Bruce's paranoia would have impressed her, were her eyes not fixed on the new dimensions on the map. To the east and further down, something glowed red.

Under the fluttering heart of a girl who'd never let herself want anything she couldn't steal, the calculated mind of a strategist flattened out the angles. Logic betrayed Selina well before she reached the cold, echoing room.

Five high-powered monitors flickered to life when she stopped short in front of them, each asking for the same three-digit code. Initials on a contract.

The force of the adrenaline draining from her body shot blacked-out blotches into her vision.

Bruce Wayne had never intended to run away with her. The Batman had been recruiting.

* * *

_—Gotham City, March 2016—_

* * *

"Let's play a game," Selina proposed, slinking back from those eyes. "Twenty questions, no fibbing. You can start."

The guard went over his gaze again as he watched her into the open double doors of her cramped bedroom. "Why did you bring me here?"

Bending over her bureau, she said, "I needed to change into something more…" Black leather unfurled. "Authoritative." She turned to drape the suit over her body. "You like?"

He allowed an appreciative noise. "Make it yourself?"

"I hired out. I take it you sew?" The image of him hunkered down over bat ears with a needle and thread was enough for a genuine smile to peek out from behind her smirk.

He returned it. "'Handcraft' would be more flattering."

Lips forming a mocking 'o,' Selina drew her silk shirt from her waistband. Then over her head.

Bruce looked around the cramped space. "Where's your roommate? The blonde."

Back to him, Selina let the regret show on her face. Then she put on a saunter to move behind her Japanese silk screen. "Unlike you, I'd never presume to spoil anyone else's fun." She made sure the shadow of her hand was visible. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Two," he guessed wrong, but the fact that he answered told her that he was paying attention.

Three fingers skimmed along her side as she stepped out of her pants. She leaned forward to tease her best angles.

A long silence followed, and Selina took advantage of it to derail the order of questions. "When did you forgive me?"

"When I saw that you'd stayed."

Her leather second skin rolled up her legs and torso. "That wasn't my choice."

"'Suffering builds character,'" he quoted.

Selina's expression soured. He couldn't know she'd recognize the source. "So, on those long, cold winter nights – whatever did you think about?" The sound of a zipper punctuated the question.

"I thought of Gotham. It wasn't cold where I was."

Her tone smoothed out as her mask settled in place. "And where were you?"

"In a more ancient part of the world. At the bottom of a very large pit."

She took a moment's pause from sliding on her boots. "How? Why? I'd understand if Bane had killed you – "

"Very nice."

" – but leaving you alive…letting the world think he was offering a revolution when all he wanted was a massacre…"

"The cruelest prison is the one that offers hope."

Fear cooled her blood. She stepped out from behind the screen, bare hands clutching the side. "You make him sound insane." Her voice was as quiet as Bruce's face was dark.

"Not insane, fanatical. He wants to raze Gotham like Sodom and Gomorrah."

"Religion?"

"In a way." His tone was harsh. "League of Shadows."

"Bane said that, when you…" Selina trailed off as Bruce turned away. She pressed forward. "He said that you were League of Shadows."

"They trained me. They wanted to me to become an executioner, so I betrayed them."

The sound of her steps died on a long sigh. This was one of those rare lines of questioning she suspected she'd regret going down. "Do I even want to know?"

Watching her slip the flash drive into the concealed pocket at the top of her boot, Bruce replied, "I'll leave that up to you," in a way that should have struck her then as cryptic.

* * *

_—St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

A stronger will than Selina's would have gathered up her tattered pride and shut the door on whatever it was that Bruce expected of her. Or had expected of her.

He was alive, he was dead – she had no way of making up her mind. She'd spend the rest of her life wondering if tomorrow would be the day she passed him on the street.

To hell with that. Selina spun the black leather chair around to claim her seat.

'C-A-T' got her access to the most powerful piece of machinery she'd had at her fingertips since she'd last revved the engines of the Batman's motorcycle. Never had she encountered so many sophisticated operating systems in one place.

Her tablet dinged, its synch with the network automatic. On the bottom screens, two programs popped open – an application to get her started on crafting a new permanent identity and a log of scanned handwritten notes cross-referenced with 'League of Shadows.'

The most recent entry, dated hours before he'd given her the flash drive, began:

'My arrogance in believing that beating Ra's al Ghul meant the end of the League of Shadows was unforgivable. Bane has taught me that lesson. He has taken my greatest hope of honoring my father's name and twisted it into a nightmarish vengeance on the city that his father died attempting to destroy.'

Not a son, Selina knew, but a daughter – 'My father's work is done,' she'd said – and a revenge so perverse as to be admired. From a distance, anyway. Up close, Selina would've scratched her eyes out.

'My punishment was suffering. Bane broke my body. He did not break my spirit. In escaping his prison, I have found my fear of death again and, with it, my will to live. Bane will fail as Ra's failed. When that time comes, I wonder if I will be stronger than my longing to release my fear at the service of Gotham.'

The screen blurred, forcing Selina to address the tears streaming down her face. 'Release my fear' – an eloquent euphemism for suicide by heroism.

'Yet, I know there is work still to be done. The League of Shadows lives up to its name not in the brutish method of the Siege but in the insidious nature of the hit on the Stock Exchange. Economics has long been the League's weapon of choice. It is a game that can be won by the right kind of mind. I believe, if put to good use, Selina Kyle has that kind of mind.

As for the legacy of the creature I created, the Batman' –

Selina pressed her palms to her aching eyes. Her name was lit up, along with Blake's, indicating he'd mentioned them in previous entries. How meticulous Bruce was to tie up his professional life. How goddamn premeditated.

A sickening thought had her searching for the term 'autopilot' – and, sure enough – 'Repair: The Bat, Autopilot system error corrected.'

Bruce had lied to her face. He'd had an autopilot.

That didn't mean he'd chosen to use it.

She closed the file on the rest of his words and fired up the center screen to start a game of her own. Bruce been right about her curiosity. He'd overestimated her reverence.

Selina was a loose end, always had been.

* * *

_—Gotham City, March 2016—_

* * *

Her fingertips traced the back of the loveseat as she approached. "You're scaring me, you know. If you want my help, you really should lie."

Bruce put his hands in his pockets, turning toward her window. "Honesty was your rule."

"I take it back." Selina stood behind him. "Now tell me you're not going to get me killed."

The slight sag in his shoulders struck her as annoyance.

Right in his ear, she hissed, "Excuse me for wanting to live."

Impassive as ever, he kept his eyes riveted on the quarter inch of skyline her view afforded her. "Here's a lie for you, Selina: No one in this city I was meant to protect has ever died because of me. Feel better?"

She pivoted, knocking Bruce half a step off balance with her shoulder. She grabbed the receiver from its ornate cradle. On the rotary dial, she spun the last number that still connected.

"Speak," said a voice that could only belong to one of Bane's terrorists.

"Pick-up," she replied and gave the address of the apartment just across the narrow alley. The line clicked dead. Selina couldn't put the phone down fast enough.

"Who's coming?" Bruce asked, finally looking at her again. "If it's Bane's men, they'll know who I really am."

"A broke billionaire with a Messiah complex?" Selina went straight for her liquor cabinet. "Don't worry, only hired guns in my neighborhood – your precious Gothamites."

The aged whiskey she poured sloshed over the shot glass rims. When she saw him notice, she put back both. Her hands were steadier pouring the second round.

"Can't blame them. That Dent Act police state you ushered in put anarchy in quite the favorable light." She forced the shot in his hand and connected their arms by the elbow. "To Batman," she proposed.

His stare fell on her mask.

"Come on, Mr. Wayne. We could be dead in the morning. Blown to smithereens."

Eye to eye, skin to skin, they downed each other's shots.

Selina went to steal another kiss, but his hand against her collarbone stopped her.

A flush threatened her composure. "Honey, I swear," she said through the pout she managed to put on. "Horace Gladstone means nothing to me."

"How could I ever be sure?" His tone was a mockery as light as his fingers. They grazed her neck, her chin. Reached out for her lips but didn't quite touch.

Then Bruce reached around her to set his shot glass down. He was halfway across her apartment with his jacket around his shoulders before she could do more than blink.

"We should go over the plan."

Selina screwed the lid on tight, wringing the whiskey bottle between her hands. "I dump you, we get your guy, you get me the hell out of this city. What's there to go over?"

"There's someone else," he said.

Felt that one coming a mile away, though she could have asked for better phrasing.

"The CEO of my company. Miranda Tate."

Sliding her fingers into her gloves, she passed Bruce on her way to the fire escape. She leaned over to signal the large F-350 truck idling by the alley.

Coming up beside her, Bruce flinched at her shrill whistle. "Ms. Kyle – "

"And where does Miranda Tate fit into the Batman's grand plan to save Gotham?"

"She doesn't. I just want her safe."

They held each other's stare, both of them knowing what Bruce was really telling Selina.

She stamped on the silent plea between them. "It's too risky as is. I won't do it."

"Fine." Never was there more disappointment packed into one syllable. Bruce looked down at the submachine guns sticking out of the windows of the truck. "We should go."

"Wait. How's your back?" Her concerned expression wasn't meant to fool him. "Things could get rough."

"Are you worried I might get hurt or hoping for it?"

Selina tsked, leaning into him. "That's the twenty-first question, Mr. Wayne. You lose," she said, and used his weight to flip him over the railing.

The truck bed bounced when he hit, balanced on his toes. From his crouch, he looked up at her with a shrug that said it was her turn. Then he tipped to his side with a scream of pain for the benefit of the his captors.

She found it difficult to resist the urge to land with a stiletto through his chest.

* * *

_—St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

In a matter of hours, Selina had Bruce's assets catalogued – from his bottomed-out stock portfolios to his brimming offshore accounts. She set alerts on activity and uncurled from her seat.

Moving the alerts to her tablet, she went to find the only bedroom in the underground cabin. She lingered in the doorway a moment to appreciate the contrast between the cold, black room she'd been working in and the warm browns and reds of the bedroom. She wondered which space Bruce would consider more personal.

In the connecting bathroom, she rummaged through his drawers and cabinets. She found a cache of spare toothbrushes, along with multiples of anything else a man or woman would require. Bruce kept his bathroom as well-stocked and sterile as a pharmacy – right down to over the counter pills in pristine white bottles. The entire mirror was lined with every kind of drug, vitamins to tranquilizers. Not a single broken seal.

Selina ran her fingertips along all-too familiar labels. Her inner voice was clamoring with questions, reactions beyond her reach. The noise of it was building to a crescendo and had been for longer than she cared to think about. She longed for neutrality.

Resolute, she shut the mirror on the lure of the easy way out. Selina took a protective sort of pride in her past indiscretions – but only those she remembered to learn from.

Teeth and face scrubbed, she crawled into Bruce's bed. Her closed eyes burned with the need for sleep, but her mind whirled on. Not even her habit of estimating thread counts got her to nod off. When she thought she was close, a noise would drag her from the fog. Not the alarm, because the accounts didn't move. A pang made her realize she was being kept up by the sounds of hunger. She laid with the gnawing sensation for a moment, remembering what it had felt like to her as a child.

Stretching her spine as she went, Selina located the immaculate kitchen. Stainless steel and marble top finishes were nothing new to her, but something about an empty stomach made her appreciate the lack of cockroaches.

Non-perishables lined the intricate wood cabinets, their sell-by dates telling her Bruce hadn't visited in at least four years, if ever. The shelves could have been stocked by whatever contracting group – or groups, she guessed, likely foreign and known for discretion – had worked on the project.

As she licked tuna from a spoon, Selina considered the design. It was a satellite base of operations, that was obvious, but she got the feeling that Bruce wouldn't have bothered making it a home for himself. The bedroom in particular looked built for two.

The term 'love nest' sprung to mind, along with an elegant face from a framed photograph. The woman that Bruce must have loved had been murdered years before the retreat he'd built her was ever finished.

Selina left the kitchen with her sad canned lunch. As much as she craved the warmth and comfort of the bedroom, she shut herself into that cold, pitch black room.

Turning on the overhead light revealed the reason for its significant drop in temperature – and made her groan. The floors and walls were a glass that covered dripping rock face.

Bruce had her working in a cave. 'Disturbed' didn't begin to explain him.

Choosing to continue in darkness, Selina rode out her jetlag on a heady wave of virtual omniscience.

It occurred to her that it wouldn't be hard to figure out which accounts were dedicated to Batman expenditures. Among other occupations, she'd moonlighted as a bartender during the so-called Year of the Bat. Which meant she'd been forced to listen to the same estimates rehashed night after night.

None had come close to the triple-digit millions it had cost the Wayne family fortune to transform its last descendent into a masked vigilante.

In the unrestricted records of Arkham Asylum, Selina looked up Gotham City's other urban legend. The one even drunkards and delinquents thought twice before whispering about.

Eight and a half years on, the sight of 'Unknown' listed after 'Name' gave her the shudders. At least his status was confirmed. He'd never left his padded cell, lending credence to the rumor from when Bane's men had liberated the almost vacant asylum. Several of the released inmates were said to have joined the security staff in twenty-four-hour guard duty over just one door.

Nobody, not Batman, not Harvey Dent, united Gotham the way the Joker did.

Into the search box, Selina typed another name – not as chilling, but much more personal. Carmine Falcone was listed missing. Circumstantial evidence indicated he'd been killed in the Siege. She bit off a curse, not in a mood to presume anyone dead. Though, in this case, she'd be glad to.

It was all the incentive she needed to get to work on making her permanent alias impenetrable.

Selina was in the process of deciding what vivacious city best embodied an 'Irène Dubrovna' when the alert sounded.

Funds were disappearing from three accounts. Some of the money was rerouted into the main Batman expenditure account, while the rest went in smaller portions faster than she could track. The zeros racked up, settling on a number Selina recognized from  _The Gotham Times_  – exactly one hundredth of the billions Bruce was supposed to have lost in the stock market.

That sum total was routed to various philanthropic groups dedicated to energy sustainability. Each gift given in the name of Miranda Tate.

So many hours in the cold had numbed Selina's body. A lack of sleep numbed her mind.

Her only reaction was a long, hissing sigh. Her first thought was, What kind of a man donates thousands in memory of the terrorist ex-lover who tried to murder him and an entire city?

The obvious answer – the kind of man who dressed up in a Kevlar bat costume and used a nuclear time bomb to fake his own death.

Selina made clawing motions to crack her knuckles. To the echoing cave, she said, "Let's see how going broke same as the rest of us builds Bruce Wayne's character," and got to work freezing his assets.

* * *

_—Gotham City, March 2016—_

* * *

At the top of the stairs leading down to the sublevel of the Gotham Stock Exchange, Selina gave Bruce a few swift pats on the cheek through the hood she'd stuffed his head into. "Please escort the Prince of Gotham to the dungeon."

That made the hired guns chuckle as they shoved Bruce down the stairs.

In a deserted alcove, Selina let a plausible amount of time pass before she strode back into the barbed-wired hall.

Her sense of purpose got her past the first few guards, but the one at the double-doors thrust his gun in her path with a growled, "Orders."

Selina, recognizing the Narrows accent underneath, took a chance. "From Barsad." Her tone was as sweet as the knife in her boot was sharp. "Would you like me to go get him so he can repeat them to you?"

The thug couldn't step aside fast enough.

Downstairs, the guards were more familiar with her or, at the very least, wanted to be. Judging by the way they stood at attention.

"Sorry to spoil things, boys," she cooed. "But Bane wants these guys to himself."

At her gesture, the guards had Bruce and the thin, older man kneeling in front of him cuffed. Lackeys, she reflected with some regret. Evil wouldn't have been without its perks.

Selina wished she still had that hood when Bruce's gaze locked on the brunette posed on her knees like a dime-novel damsel. No hint of irony in his voice, he told her, "I won't forget about you."

Miranda Tate's big blue eyes swam. "I know."

Selina flicked her own eyes up and over. Three of the guards fell over themselves to be the ones to lead her prisoners from the dungeon. How sweet.

Too bad she couldn't keep them. In the alcove, she lowered her goggles. The cuter of the two in front of her got a spiked heel to the face and the other, his mouth open to cry out, took a punch to the throat. Bruce took care of the third guard and kicked away his gun. All were down for the count in under five seconds.

If she weren't so anxious to get Bruce out of her sight, Selina might have shown off a little.

Fox still looked plenty impressed as she picked his handcuffs. However long he'd spent in that dungeon hadn't been enough to douse the old man's spark of humor. He rubbed his wrists, smiling. "I like your girlfriend, Mr. Wayne."

She injected as much condescension as she could muster into her retort and sent it Bruce's way – "He should be so lucky" – but all she heard was the bitterness of a girl forever picked last when it counted.

Selina left Bruce without a backward glance.

She would track him down to collect on his debt after night fell. Selina Kyle got what was coming to her, in the end. She made sure of it. Even when what she was owed was so much less than what she wanted.

* * *

_—St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

One accessible account with funds enough to make it to St. Moritz on a budget was all Selina left Bruce. Only a matter of time before he was forced to take her hint.

There was satisfaction to be had in the wait. Irène Dubrovna came to life, a glory of backlit Technicolor, borne of an adult's scrutiny of mistakes not to be repeated and child's desperate make-believe, never forgotten.

There was temptation, too. A confessional writ in the hand of an interesting man, that rarest species, with her own name highlighted in gold. She would have poured over each entry, first to last and back again, had the contents been hers to steal. Freely given, her eye slid to the side and turned each word into a slanted gambit she would not read.

She rerouted her curiosity through his Orwellian nightmare machine, foregoing regular sleep to appease her insatiable appetite for 'so that's what they don't want us to know' and the minor thrill it gave.

But the thrill gave way to boredom and left an opening for revenge – which was just about the order of how these things went with her. Her scratching broke the surface of the Clean Slate technology's more deviating applications. She drafted schemes wiser left to fantasy. From them, she cut out any room for him.

Just once did she dream of his glittering eyes and naked chin. Of his shadow, crouched on the ledge her bruised, skinny legs dangle from. He asks if she's learned yet why she's crying, and she balls her fists and tucks her chin. Because they blew out her stars and thought she wouldn't miss what she'd never seen. They said, 'Stars don't shine in Gotham.' But from the roof she caught them twinkling over the western river. She spits her mother's sigh: 'Used to be even the East End had stars. But that was before – '

Selina woke up slumped in yet another in a series of strange body configurations between her chair and the computer desk. The alarm had been ringing for fifteen minutes. Account balance: zero. The blur of night and day came into sharp focus. She realized she'd been counting. Seven endless nights.

She cued up all the security cameras, turned on all the lights, upstairs and down. She started showering again. She tracked down a bottle of champagne. She packed.

The morning after night eight, she put on her one pair of practical shoes and put his treadmill to use. After night nine, she ran five miles at a grueling uphill slant. After ten, she doubled that while mulling over the genetics of mental breakdowns and what Maria Kyle would say happened to souls damned to limbo.

Night eleven, a battered jeep turned off the last marked road for miles.

Selina didn't need to see the driver to know that she'd won, yet she had her nose pressed almost to the screen for a glimpse of him. Headlights flared in the camera for a matter of seconds before the feed died. The next camera went black even quicker and so on up the lane, until the entire cabin powered off.

No need for shadows in perfect darkness. Selina stood from her chair, intending to meet Bruce at the door. Every night, she'd waited for him to come so that she could start her clean break with the sunrise.

Leaving just enough time for one last game.

* * *

_—Florence + the Machine—_

* * *

_I took the stars from my eyes, and then I made a map_

_And knew that somehow I could find my way back_

_Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too_

_So I stayed in the darkness with you_

_The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out_

_You left me in the dark — no dawn, no day_

_I'm always in this twilight, in the shadow of your heart_

* * *

__For extras related to this chapter, visit **thatcraftykid-spectrum dot tumblr dot com**  and click the 3. YOU LEFT ME IN THE DARK tag._   
_

_Disclaimer: **"You're not my original work. You're practice."**  All rights to Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros. Studios, and DC Comics. No infringement intended._


	4. DRUMMING NOISE INSIDE MY HEAD

**SPECTRUM**

_**a Catwoman Continuation** _

**by thatcraftykid**

* * *

**4\. DRUMMING NOISE INSIDE MY HEAD**

* * *

— _Florence + the Machine—_

* * *

_There's a drumming noise inside my head that starts when you're around_

_I swear that you could hear it, it makes such an almighty sound_

_There's a drumming noise inside my head that throws me to the ground_

_I swear that you should hear it, it makes such an almighty sound_

_Louder than sirens, louder than bells, sweeter than heaven, and hotter than hell_

_I ran to a tower where the church bells chime, I hoped that they would clear up my mind_

_They left a ringing in my ear, but that drum's still beating loud and clear_

* * *

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

Her pulse beat against her eardrums. The rest was silence.

Bare feet light on the stairs, Selina moved from varnished mahogany to knotted pine. She skirted the moonlight that shone into unshuttered windows as she went to the front door. Through the magnified peephole, she could make out a jeep parked in the tree line. Her eye scanned to the edge of each peripheral.

A shadow passing to her far left had her pulling back to hold her fingers over her spreading mouth. Cornered in a blacked-out cabin miles and miles from anyone to hear her scream – Selina had always grinned through slasher flicks, at the thrilling absurdity of theatrical violence and empty threats. And here she was, alone with a man known for his mask and the fear it inspired in the wicked.

Whatever was she going to do with him?

She tilted her ear against the door, imagining his breath rolling against the other side.

Before he could make his way around to some secret entrance – or, worse, knock – Selina disengaged the deadlocks. She pushed up to grab hold of the large trophy header hanging above. Using her toes, she turned the knob and swung onto the wide shelf.

As she maneuvered into a crouch, the door creaked open on a dare. Her good mood soured when that traitorous part of her thought, More like a trap.

Which that man walked right into.

Selina could have sighed as she slid a thin rapier from its decorative mount. He really should know better by now.

* * *

— _Gotham City, October 2015—_

* * *

The clatter of iron against steel shuddered through her but did not disturb her outward repose. Seated, Selina leaned on a support beam in the center of the tunnel. Dim and flickering light exposed her presence and, if the Batman was as all-knowing as they used to whisper, maybe even her intentions.

Foreshadowing, she thought, reflecting on a semester of tenth grade English and a desk as graffitied as the platform behind her. The sudden hair-trigger nostalgia made her grimace.

Gotham City had broken faith with Selina Kyle at eight years old, and eight years ago the Batman had broken faith with Gotham City. The oncoming Storm would settle the score on both accounts.

Or else Bane would continue the cycle of broken faiths as foundational to Gotham as its crumbling infrastructure. Or, who knows, more impossible things had happened – the Batman could save Gotham for old time's sake and leave the city to its natural rot.

One way or another, it couldn't be conscience making Selina grit her teeth. Had to be fury.

Duped and teased by two entitled yuppies who spewed money from their puffed-up swinging dicks, manipulated and intimidated by a couple of masked crusaders notorious for histories of violence – and so what if the comparisons weren't fair? She'd never let a soft spot get her dead.

She had no debts to the heir to the Gotham throne or his bat-eared 'powerful friend.' And games were no fun when she wasn't even a contender. A lesson from her childhood: tighter the corner, tougher the fight to own what little choice there was.

The midnight train pulled out of the station, beginning the clatter again. Her pulse raced along with it. As its light receded, the shadows to her right took on new substance.

"Don't be shy." She sounded playful. She felt lethal.

* * *

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

Selina followed the path of the moonlight to rest the tip of the rapier between visible vertebrae.

With equal slowness, her midnight caller raised his elbows, hands up.

Effort was required to keep her exhales from becoming as audible as his shallow breaths.

Smirking down the length of the blade, she called up her silkiest tones. "Why so nervous? You're already dead."

"Sorry to disappoint."

The hoarse reply shuddered through Selina, as if Bruce Wayne had murmured it in her ear while slapping her face. She'd made herself vulnerable when she'd chosen to choke out that admission rather than choke back the raw emotion he'd moved her to.

Fuck him if he was mocking that. Fuck him if he was trying to make her feel it again.

She pushed out a throaty laugh. "Apologies do nothing for me. Now, payback…" Selina brushed the very tip of the rapier down his neck and over his collar. "Well, a girl's got to have her fun."

Bruce didn't even try to step away as Selina twisted the blade into the heavy folds of that worn jacket of his.

"I liked your little trick with the lights. Worried about your power bill?" she needled.

"I did get the impression you wouldn't want to see me like this."

"Oh, but that was an invitation." Selina prodded him to turn so his face was in the path of the light. He only budged far enough for her to make out a sharp cheekbone. "I'd hoped you'd appreciate it as much as I appreciated mine."

The shadows that moved with his nostril-flaring snort showed that he'd grown the beard he'd worn to play invalid. "One of us had a first class ticket purchased for her. The other arrived in one of the most expensive places on earth to buy a bar of soap stinking of fish bait and exhaust fumes."

As amusing as that was, anger still colored her response. "You hijacked my Clean Slate. Imagining, what? That I'd waste my well-earned fresh start playing angel to your phantom Charlie?"

"I offered you a productive, challenging, and lucrative outlet for your highly desirable skill set. What about that upset you most?"

"Check your tone, Wayne." His shoulders were becoming far too relaxed, but several expert jabs tensed him right up. "It's the arrogance. Paternalism isn't a turn-on."

"Something about me has to be." Bruce sounded as entertained as he had when he'd told her his safe was uncrackable.

Selina ran the blade between the deep v of his shoulders to remind him of her temper. "Careful…"

Bruce would have cut himself with his shrug had she not pulled back. He used that moment of weakness against her, ducking the rapier and fading out of sight.

So he had come to play.

She dropped down after him, landing on the balls of her feet and sweeping into a circle defense. Selina let the light fall on her bared teeth as she searched for the dark, concealed eyes she could feel trailing the length of her body.

* * *

— _Gotham City, October 2015—_

* * *

The all-too familiar feeling of being studied under the gaze of a silent predator came over Selina.

From where there seemed to have been nothing, the Batman appeared.

Selina demanded, "Wayne says you can get me the Clean Slate."

"That depends," he replied, voice like the gravel that crunched under his boots.

Her eyes roamed the muscular contours of that suit. He might have the program on him. Maybe he'd hand it right over, and she could have her life and live it, too. "On what?"

"On what you want it for," was his answer. "I acquired it to keep it out of the wrong hands."

Interesting tidbit, if annoying. Was that the kind of thing masked vigilantes got up to when they weren't torpedoing innocent double-parked cars?

She considered the pretty penny that golden utility belt must have set him back. How much profit was there in the greater good? Was his bankroll exclusive to Wayne?

Her brow quirked as her eyes lowered to the molded bulge between his armored thighs. Did the Batman ever wear his costume for recreational purposes? Or was he, as some had guessed, only the stern sum of cape and cowl?

Was he man or beast? Which did she prefer?

Did it matter?

A lot of questions she'd never get to ask. And he might never get to answer.

So she asked the questions that would get this over with – "Still don't trust me, huh?" A dangerous irony curved over her lips. "How can we change that?"

"You can start by taking me to Bane."

She wanted to laugh, but it really wasn't funny. So much for legend. The Batman wasn't omniscient – he wasn't even well-informed, if he thought the element of surprise would be enough to win him a fight against Bane and his fanatic militia.

The Batman was determined to dig his own grave. Selina was just carrying his shovel.

Feeling a little better and a lot worse, she tried to unburden herself with a shrug. Getting up, she said, "You asked."

* * *

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

"Why am I here, Ms. Kyle?"

The question seemed to come from all around her. She concentrated on finding his voice.

"You have your Clean Slate. You have all my money. You could have trashed my network and disappeared. If not an apology, what else could you possibly want from me?"

Ignoring the knowing subtext, she replied, "Call me curious. Why'd they both have to die?" She almost had him in her sights, but she had to be sure.

Quick as a reflex, he droned, "People need dramatic examples to inspire their best selves – "

Selina reached behind her to slant the rapier across his throat. "Bored now." The bottom of her black silk robe lifted from her thighs as she spun into the shadows. "Let's talk about me."

"Wasn't I?" he asked after a heavy swallow that must have at least nicked him. "You chose to stay to protect Gotham as Batman would have. And you trusted Bruce Wayne enough to kill you."

"You…" The syllable hissed out of her as she fought to keep the rapier steady.

The thought of him lurking, watching her mourn a terrible ideal, a pretty lie – The thought set fire to her skin, but the dark kept that secret from him.

Rolling the very tip of the blade against his Adam's apple, she used the lump in her own throat to purr, "You stalker. A girl's never been so flattered." It occurred to her that she hadn't bothered to get a good look at her airport driver. "What'd you do, sew a fat suit for the chance to watch me change in the back seat?"

"No," he replied with low chuckle she should've let him bleed out on. "I was indisposed at the time. But I was listening."

In an instant, the rapier was twisted out of her grip. She dodged his attempt to pin her to him, retreating with her weight balanced on her toes. She crept around him.

His voice stayed in place. "To answer your question, they both had to die because Batman could be anyone, but I allowed the vendettas to become personal."

Selina fixed a glare on the back of his self-loathing head. "Case in point – your little miss terrorist donation stunt. To accomplish what, exactly?"

"Justice."

The sound that came out of her throat was as jarring as laughter at a funeral. His fucking moral guardian act had just confirmed her worst suspicions – not a resurrection but a reprieve. She hoped his death wish kept him warm at night.

Between Selina and the open front door, the blade thunked into a moonlit patch of wood.

"Don't be shy," Bruce demanded, overtaking her from behind. He stopped short of touching her, save for his breath against her burning neck. "Tell me what you want from me."

When she still didn't answer, his arm tucked around her waist, his hand closed around her fingers to turn her toward him. Light and shadow hollowed out the contours of his face as he leaned into her.

It was the first time Bruce kissed Selina. As his hadn't the first time Selina had kissed Bruce, her lips didn't move under his. He made her anger taste of longing – one more way he'd shackle her to him when all she wanted were unburdened hands.

Bruce pulled back just far enough to speak. "Why am I here?"

Selina dropped her cheek against his beard and her gaze to their interlocked fingers. She didn't answer because she shouldn't have to. He'd been a playboy hedonist, a shut-in ascetic. He knew about obsession and its only cure – experience. Once attained, anything could be disregarded.

Stepping past Bruce, she led him by the hand into the darker recesses of his retreat.

* * *

— _Gotham City, October 2015—_

* * *

Selina took off down the tracks. The Batman's footfalls were as silent as hers were heading into the not-so abandoned utility tunnel. Rats scurried out of their way as they ducked cobwebs. The murkier it got, the sorrier she felt for herself.

"From here, Bane's men patrol the tunnels. And they're not your average brawlers." An echo of what he had told her the night before. If he'd asked her how she knew that now, she might not have lied.

But he responded with a bravado that shouldn't have sounded so unconvincing: "Neither am I."

Clamor from the tunnel ahead had Selina putting up her hand to signal him. He was already at her back, her wrist caught between his padded fingers.

"My lead." The words were gruffer than a whisper, softer than a snarl. The electricity they shot over her skin was uninvited.

As quick as her inhale, the Batman set off down the stairs. His shadow went one way around the bend, Selina took the other.

The first in the patrol squad scanned the curve in the tunnel. He had the leather jacket and military fatigues of a mercenary, but he held an automatic rifle like an amateur. She recognized him as one of Jen's old crew – the one who'd only addressed Selina as 'beautiful girl' with all the cocky presumption of any punk too streetwise to understand what it really took to be a man.

Because he was a decoy, because he'd always been a victim, Selina almost meant her warning: "He's behind you."

Expression frozen, the punk couldn't seem to help his backward turn. "Who?"

"Me." The growl came from a beast, or so the punk must've thought with that kind of fear. Hanging like his namesake, the Batman enveloped him in darkness.

Gunfire lit up the tunnel. Selina played bait, luring them one at a time into sudden traps. Misdirection, illusion, fright – it wasn't lost on her that the Batman was mirroring the tactics of Bane, minus his blunt edge.

There was a grace to the way the Batman moved, the way she moved with him and he with her. Selina had learned to fight by turning instinct into choreography. Ducking in and out of shadows for well-timed bursts of violence, beauty and the beast dodged bullets and picked off the patrol like partners in a dance.

* * *

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

They paced out a rhythm as they made their way to the bedroom. A pull and release.

Bruce stopped her on the stairs to bury his face in her hair as he shook out her clip. His other hand reached around her front to untie knotted silk. He held an end between two fingers, the belt slipping from its loops with each of her steps.

At the end of the hallway, Selina stopped Bruce, pinning his chest against the wall so she could slide his jacket from his shoulders. Her toes gripped his heels as she helped him out of his shoes. Both barefoot, her mouth was in line with the slope of his shoulder blade, which protruded when he spun to push them into motion.

She led him walking backward, her chin angled toward his dark shape. Denim brushed silk, their legs coming together at each stride.

With her foot, Selina swung the bedroom door the rest of the way open. The movement pressed her thigh between his, compelling Bruce to swoop in to tease her mouth the way she teased his groin.

The roll of their bodies kept the rhythm that their hands didn't bother with. His palms chaffing her shoulders, her robe pooled to the carpet. She skirted off his cotton shirt as he unclasped her bra. His jeans followed, her fingers curling over the lines of his jutting hipbones.

She stilled.

Bruce increased the pressure of his mouth on her cheek, her chin, her collarbone. He was coaxing her back into the moment, but her hands could not ignore the depressions in his abdomen, the definition of his ribcage.

Bruce took her nipple between his lips with a soft moan of pleasure that became a shocked groan of pain when Selina swept her nails up the swollen scar tissue on his side and down again.

The force he used to catch hold of her wrists pushed their bodies apart.

* * *

— _Gotham City, October 2015—_

* * *

The sounds of rushing water filled the black, cavernous space.

"Just a little further," Selina promised, slipping behind the Batman moments before a heavy steel grate slammed down, forever separating them.

Halogen lights scattered shadows, exposing elevated gantries and interconnecting platforms lined with a small army of stone-faced mercenaries.

He turned around to fix her with an expression she hadn't thought him capable of. Selina Kyle had managed to surprised the Batman. Not exactly the kind of thing people bragged about to their grandchildren.

She tried not to look at his eyes, his chin. Anything that made him a man. It could have been worse, she thought, gaze darting away from his mouth. She could have done it with a kiss.

As if the grate was her confessional, she murmured, "I had to find a way to stop them trying to kill me."

In other words, while she had approached the Pharisees herself, the only silver she'd been promised was the Clean Slate he'd offered himself. She was uncomfortable with how much she wanted him to know that.

"You've made a serious mistake." His threat was a blow to the chest.

He was the Batman. He'd risked life and limb every night for more than a year to save any number of thankless Gothamites. And now he was standing before Selina, telling her – because of what she'd done, because of who she'd become – her life was the one not worth his.

Before she could spit out a whimper, a voice, chilling in its garbled refinement, pervaded the distance between them. "Not as serious as yours, I fear."

The masked man came from between twin waterfalls and onto the catwalk. The Batman turned his back to Selina, a dismissal if she'd ever felt one.

She had ice in her veins. She couldn't go.

"Bane," the Batman acknowledged.

His stature was dwarfed with every one of Bane's muscle-rippling steps forward. "Let's not stand on ceremony here." And then he called the Batman by name.

* * *

 

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

Selina yanked her wrists from Bruce's grasp and backed away from him.

She was grateful to the dark. The dark kept her from having to know what kind of shape he'd been forced to come here in, kept him from seeing the moment before anger burned guilt.

Before she could even try for the door, Bruce covered the distance between them. Her nipples dragged the rough expanse of his chest as he pressed her to him. His hands moved from her hips to take hold of her face.

"Why are you here?" she bit off a heartbeat before his lips came down against her teeth.

Where the waistband of his briefs had been before she'd tugged them off, Selina sank her nails into skin. The hard length of him, cradled in her lace-covered pelvis, spasmed. She trailed scratches on his jagged back as he kissed his way down her torso.

No light to see him by, she tried to let the shape of him blur into the faceless set of gluttons who'd long sought out her punishment as a balm for their empty ingratitude, their private sins.

A faint crack forced her eyes toward the floor where he must have lowered himself, along with her thong. Lips found the space between her thighs – those lips, soft and full. She recognized their every curve by touch, so how was it that she had ever been blind to them by sight?

Those lips formed the name she had never let a mark use against her: "Selina." Three syllables that beat with a deep down pulse.

Twisting her fingers into the thick roots of his hair, she pulled him the few steps back to the bed. She didn't loosen her grip as she wrapped a leg around his back and dropped them onto silk sheets.

In the same motion, he thrust inside of her with a guttural cry louder than her hiss – "Bruce."

* * *

 

— _Gotham City, October 2015—_

* * *

"Mr. Wayne."

Selina felt the shock ripple through her long before the fog that wrapped itself around her brain could make sense of what Bane could not have said.

That man was a cripple, or near to it. With age marks at his temples and a smirk as lazy as his prosperity. His skin smelled of privilege and he had trouble catching a cab. She'd seen him just hours ago, tucked inside his mansion and another brunette.

The Batman could be anyone but that man.

But no denial came. Only a driving punch Bane stopped with one massive palm. Selina could hear crushed bones and grunted pain. Bane blocked another shot with even less effort.

"Peace has cost you your strength. Victory has defeated you."

Less a taunt than a statement backed up by violent blows that knocked the Batman backward and then sent him plummeting from the catwalk. His cape slowed his descent, but Selina still winced at the crack in his knees when he landed on the unyielding ledge.

A chain rattled under Bane's weight as he climbed down, the heads of his soldiers dropping to follow their leader. Her eyes never left the Batman.

She jumped at the flash-bangs he threw around Bane's unflinching head. He approached, speaking about theatricality and deception – "Powerful agents for the uninitiated."

The Batman tossed both suggestions aside to lunge at Bane. Exertion ripped, ragged, from his throat with each strike and counter.

His breathing unencumbered, Bane stepped back for a moment. "But we are the initiated, aren't we, Bruce?"

The metal grate cut indents into her clenched fingers.

Emotion iced Bane's voice as he growled about shadow leagues and betrayal. The Batman's response was choked by labored breaths.

Selina closed her eyes and listened only to her own heartbeat, not wanting to hear anything familiar in that voice or to hear that name again. What she could not shut out were the blows that echoed from his body to hers. She hated him in those moments. She willed the fight to leave him. She prayed for him to stay down.

* * *

 

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

"Bruce" – he slammed into her with nothing held back, and Selina absorbed each stroke with her back arched high.

As the tension built, beads of sweat began to drip onto her skin and roll between her breasts. A tremor ran through the tight muscles of his legs, his arms. He dropped his weight onto his elbows, and the heat of his slickened skin rubbed hers raw.

Selina recognized the exertion, ripped and ragged, behind his labored grunts. She remembered how he would not give in.

Into his lower back, she ground her heels. A bark of absolute pain broke him down on top of her.

Not a lot of strength was required to leverage his empty weight onto the mattress. Her knees at his sides and his hands on her hips, he pushed himself up to meet her despite the friction on his angry wound.

His hurt was hers. She was the one to cry out. A half-vicious whisper – "This is what you want from me?"

Bruce stopped, at last, and so did Selina, hating him for his gasping, "What?"

Had either of them been able to let go, the pitch blackness of the room would have swallowed them whole.

* * *

— _Gotham City, October 2015—_

* * *

Her eyes sprang open to nothingness.

Bane's voice came from the black. "Ah. You think darkness is your ally. You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it."

She leaned forward, no reason to believe that he would do the smart thing, stay hidden and run as far away as she wanted to be.

"I didn't see the light until I was already a man. And by then it was nothing to me but blinding – " With that growled last word, light revealed that Bane had reached into his dark and grabbed the Batman by the throat. "The shadows betray you, because they belong to me."

The terror that rose in Selina tasted of bile.

Bane slammed the Batman's limp body onto the concrete, his bare fist into the side of his head. Punch after unrelenting punch hammered his cowl until it fractured like bone.

And yet he remained conscious. His eyes might have swept her as they moved to the ceiling.

With perfect calm, Bane announced, "I will show you where I've built my home while preparing to bring justice to Gotham. Then I will break you."

Muscles all but numb, Selina covered her ears when Bane pressed down on a charger. The blast caved in the ceiling, spraying rubble and dropping a desert camouflaged tumbler straight into the catacombs.

"Your precious armory gratefully accepted. We will need it," Bane said, gesturing for his mercenaries to climb into the building above.

Wayne Tower, the functional part of her mind supplied. Even as the rest of it refused to believe.

The Batman staggered to his feet, despite his concussion or maybe because of it. Selina had never seen anything more pathetic, more moving than his half-raised fists.

Bane regarded the man who would not stay down. "I wondered which would break first – your spirit – " He had to lunge forward to catch the punch the Batman threw. Bane grabbed and lifted him high above his head, holding him up with both arms extended – "Or your body."

Burning tears clung to her lashes, refusing to fall. Refusing her even that much relief from the soft spot that throbbed like a bruise.

Nothing left, the Batman fell against Bane's knee with a force savage enough to bend his spine with an horrific crack.

To Selina's reeling vision, the crack seemed to shake the walls.

Gasping, she watched Bane dump the immobile body on the ground and crouch at his side. When he stood, he took the mask with him. It dangled like a trophy, then fell from his fingertips as he walked away.

Bloody, swollen welts marred the face of Bruce Wayne.

At his command, Bane's men came to carry his broken body out of sight. She left his survival to the mercy of the devil.

* * *

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

Selina leaned into the hand that caressed her rigid neck as remorse coursed through her.

She let Bruce bring their faces together, eyes straining. A breath apart and she couldn't even distinguish his silhouette. The dark compressed her chest and his, heavy as their beating hearts.

His fingers continued to slide through her hair to massage her scalp as she glided her body into a position that released the pressure from his back and side.

Selina held Bruce inside of her, not knowing how to move from here. The game was forfeit, any punishment would be self-inflicting. All that remained was the ache of some vital want – too bright for his darkness, too sweet for her taste.

Her forehead dipped to his, rocking their hips into a gentle pull and release. She inhaled his shaking breaths, nursed his lips until they parted on a note as far from pain as Selina could inspire.

She had given without taking – an apology if ever she'd made one.

* * *

— _Gotham City, October 2015—_

* * *

Released, Selina slunk back into the shadows.

Disoriented by the first curve in the tunnel, she spun with a hand pressed to her trembling mouth. She made the unconscious decision to follow the sound of rushing water. As she crouched through narrowing outlets, she kept throwing looks over her shoulder.

No one was following her, for now. And why should they? She'd chosen their side when she'd led him into hell.

Crawling now, Selina forced her chin up.

From her mother's skewed religion, she'd gleaned two things besides bitterness: one, Jesus loves the poor more than the rich and prostitutes more than anyone; and, two, that no one asks to be Judas.

His role had been forced on her when the Batman had leapt to her defense on that rooftop, and Bruce Wayne had bought her services with payment she was already owed.

A breeze blew back the hair that clung to her damp skin as she approached the open grille. It was wide enough and high enough to offer the possibility of swinging out the top without dirtying herself in sewage.

No fate worse than wet leather, she told herself.

She was trying to push away the thought of his fate when her crawlspace ended, dropping her into the current.

Filthy water filled her mouth, rushed her eardrums. If she had kept her eyes closed, given into the feeling of punishment for one second, she would have dashed her head against concrete and sank.

Selina kept her eyes open as she slid under the grate. As far as she was concerned, the only thing Judas could do any different would be to keep his neck out of that noose. Selina could do what his story never allows – she would collect her thirty pieces and get the hell out of Jerusalem.

She pulled herself from the drain and shook off cold water. Throwing her leg over the side, her heel skidded on the concrete and broke in two.

The first of many haunting echoes of that crack.

* * *

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_

* * *

Selina was double knotting her robe closed on her way out the door when light sent her throbbing pulse straight to her head.

Agitated fingers drumming the doorframe, she counted to nine with her eyes closed before she trusted herself to speak. "I'm done stealing from you," she told him. "So I'd appreciate it if you'd be done stalking me."

"I need help," Bruce said to Selina.

In her peripheral she could see that he'd turned on the lights with some high-tech panel inside the nightstand. "You got a lot of fancy toys, you'll manage."

"I need your help." He was emphatic.

Selina turned to look at Bruce. Took in his uneven beard, his disheveled hair. Blotched and colorless skin pulled taut over the clear-cut bones of his face. Lying down, the bottom of his ribcage stuck out over the sheet he'd thrown across his waist.

"You need a doctor, or a decent embalmer," she replied. The harshness of her worry turned her tone into disgust.

"I said you wouldn't want to see me like this." Behind his wry expression was resignation. He seemed, what, embarrassed? Which made the whole thing pathetic, herself included.

"It's been a month." She had to point that out for a least two reasons.

"The knife…Talia." The fleshy, purple gash on his side compressed as he sat up. "She'd poisoned it with a hallucinogenic toxin."

"Christ, Bruce," Selina said, accusation undirected. "You've got some taste in women."

She'd thought that one worthy of at least a wheeze, but Bruce regarded her with a stare as serious as the grave he looked to have crawled out of.

"Make all the quips you want. They won't make me forget."

Her throat hardened. He'd taken too long to throw that in her face, she was ready – "Fuck your guilt." Her voice cracked like ice in rushing water. "I came back for you. I blasted him through a wall, and I saved your life."

"Bane?" Bruce was incredulous.

She'd gotten him wrong. Of course. She'd always get him wrong about this, about them. About what they weren't and would never be. "Let me – Let it go." She wrung her hands. "Water under the bridge."

But an intensity that was so far beyond her had already filled his eyes. He was in constant pain. He was weak with exhaustion, coming off a nightmare poison, five months in hell, and a decade – a lifetime – of mania and grief. She was choking on her heart in her throat, because she was a girl who played games with emotions and drew blood for fun. This man would bury her alive.

As the sting of her panic grew, a blankness came over Bruce. "What you see when you look at me is...that night. The past." His face ticked like an echo in silence as he worked out the implications.

Selina didn't offer anything more she saw. Better for the both of them if she didn't look. Nor did she ask Bruce what he saw when he looked at her. She couldn't, the force of his need had washed her out. There was nothing left.

"You feel," Bruce continued, "in my debt." When Selina again gave him nothing, he hung his head on his nod. "So help me one last time, then let it go." He locked that stare on her again. "I'll let you go."

In the hollow cavity of her chest, her heart drummed.

* * *

— _Florence + the Machine—_

* * *

_I run to the river and dive straight in, I pray that the water will drown out the din_

_But as the water fills my mouth it couldn't wash the echoes out_

_But as the water fills my mouth, it couldn't wash the echoes out_

_I swallow the sound and it swallows me whole 'til there's nothing left inside my soul_

_As empty as that beating drum, but the sound has just begun_

_As I move my feet towards your body, I can hear this beat, it fills my head up_

_And gets louder and louder, it fills my head up and gets louder and louder_

* * *

_For extras related to this chapter, visit **thatcraftykid-spectrum dot tumblr dot com**  and click the 4. DRUMMING NOISE INSIDE MY HEAD tag._

_Disclaimer: **"You're not my original work. You're practice."**  All rights to Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros. Studios, and DC Comics. No infringement intended._


	5. A RABBIT-HEARTED GIRL

**SPECTRUM**

_**a Catwoman Continuation** _

**by thatcraftykid**

* * *

**5\. A RABBIT-HEARTED GIRL**

* * *

—  _Florence + the Machine —_  


* * *

_The looking glass, so shiny and new, how quickly the glamour fades_

_I start spinning, slipping out of time, was that the wrong pill to take?_

_Raise it up, you made a deal, and now it seems you have to offer up_

_But will it ever be enough, it's not enough, raise it up_

_Here I am, a rabbit-hearted girl, frozen in the headlights_

_It seems I've made the final sacrifice_

* * *

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_  


* * *

The steam that rolled over Selina's reflection softened her like a golden era starlet under a vaseline-coated lens. But glamour was quick to fade, laying bare a face thinned-out and drained of color. Mirrors with heated surfaces. An attention to detail consistent with a mind suffering from a compulsion for functional luxury at its most inconvenient. Waterlogged was never a look Selina wore well.

Annoyance sparked life into her eyes. She let it kindle.

She lifted her arms to wring out her hair, side-eyeing the doubled-over profile that loomed large on frosted glass. The walled partition spoke of deep-seated issues with the practicalities of shared space. But the medium was a contradiction of intimacy. His blurred silhouette, bent over a churning faucet, laid across her body.

Bruce might not be watching her now, but the stare that had driven her into the bathroom was still heavy on her mind. He hadn't said a word after he'd turned her slip of the tongue into an ultimatum. Though she'd balked at his finality, for once she hadn't the will to argue her price.

That lapse alone was reason enough to run.

Selina shut her eyes and blasted a hairdryer. The heat was scorching steel, concrete, marble; the noise was a fusion of foreign tongues and traffic jams. Anonymity against an attractive backdrop. Why were her toughest fights always for the basics?

When she flicked off the dryer, all was cool and quiet again. For the moment her skin was her own.

Sure she was alone, she moved to the other side of the partition. Selina pushed aside her reflection to have a look through the extensive rows of white bottles lining his medicine cabinet.

She was smart about the pills she chose to mix but didn't give herself time to reconsider before she tossed them back. For two weeks, she'd kept out of his stash. She'd get her release out of him one way or another.

Batting the mirror closed, she watched her throat churn as she swallowed her weak will. A moment passed full of silence, empty of staying hands.

Trading a towel for her robe, Selina reversed her hasty retreat to the bathroom. The bed she'd left Bruce lying in was made up like they'd never tangled the sheets, which were now turned down on the side she preferred. The clothes she'd dragged from his squandered body no longer scattered like breadcrumbs into the hall.

Indignation set her off. She'd been halfway out the door and he the one coaxing her back in with the promise of ledgers wiped clean. If he thought he could pocket her marker and disappear on her again –

"Bruce." Selina was on the stairs before she caught herself.

Silk pajamas rustled as he turned to look down on her. "I'm here." He betrayed no hint of a smirk under his beard, but that didn't stop Selina from seeing one.

"Listen," she said in a tone far from the way she'd called his name. "I've got plans, you've got a city to haunt – let's not waste anybody's time here. How exactly am I supposed to help you?"

Bruce leaned back against the banister. "I'm sure you've got a fair amount of that put together by now." Off her lifted brow, his furrowed. "You didn't read it."

So he had meant for her to swallow his journal whole. Her turn to smirk. "Busy gal."

A long scrutiny of her face was Bruce's reply. The paper-thin quality of the skin that hung beneath his eyes mirrored her own. "We both need sleep," he said, dropping her gaze at last to climb to the top step.

Selina pressed her mouth into a thin line. Separate beds. Game over due to forfeit.

"We'll talk in the morning."

"I was going to leave in the morning," she told him, because it was beyond irritating the way he assigned meaning to her every tick. Because doing the same wasn't half as amusing on her end. Because it was true. "Just how long do you mean to trespass on my generous nature?"

"I left that up to you," he said in that cryptic way of his. He climbed out of sight.

Rolling her eyes upward brought on the spins. She steadied herself against the banister. "Mr. Wayne?" she called out.

He returned to crouch, with difficulty, on the edge of the trapdoor. His look of expectation was the same as the one he'd worn the first time he'd asked for her help. She'd been in a hell of mood then, too. Pissed off at her own desperation, but not blind to his intrigue and the chance to have some fun.

"I'm sorry I took all your money."

The line was supposed to have come out ironic to prompt his reply of 'No, you're not', so she could angle her shoulders for a view, mewl, 'Bet you are,' and know she wasn't the only one going to bed unsatisfied.

But her tongue had became too thick for tart replies.

Three pills she'd taken. The one that kicked in fast and hard haloed Bruce and made her squint against that stare he settled on her again. She sent it right back, giving up the struggle not to slump. As if to say, Take it in, Wayne. This is what you've done to me.

He seemed ready to accept the guilt, surprise, surprise. "Apologies really don't suit you," said the guy blocking the light at the end of the tunnel he'd dropped her in.

Her answer was a laugh, disembodied.

She left Bruce at that. Turned around and teetered away. He could work out the warning in her abrupt departure himself. No need to waste words on her mercenary understanding of 'sorry' as a concept – debt and obligation and guilt and attachment – and the shame that she could never leave behind walls closing in.

Lights out in the bedroom, Selina clawed the sheets toward the floor to undo his supposed kindness. She rolled onto the empty mattress.

If he could be clear, she would be cold.

For the Robinsons and anyone who'd ever made her sorry, she'd fought and cussed and spat – she hadn't helped until she'd detached. She could play the professional when she needed to. She could get this over with.

Selina's eyelids twitched as she sank into an easy way out.

* * *

— _Gotham City, March 2016—_  


* * *

Night had long fallen over the city when Selina got out of a stolen Escalade and stepped onto the littered sidewalk. Through a haze of snowfall, she met the black stare of a solitary figure crouched on the glass canopy above her head.

"Keep it close, honey," she said, lobbing the keys at him. They'd barely made a sound against his glove before he was tossing them back. She caught them and paused to pout. "The service around here has really gone downhill."

"Meet me at the nesting docks."

The voice he chose made her point out the abandoned street with a slow pivot.

"Before dawn."

A flap of his cape, and the Batman was gone. Off to prepare for war.

Commitment to a con was something Selina appreciated. What Bruce had just revealed about his nature went deeper, cut to the core of a person whose sense of self was forged by fractures. That was something Selina understood.

Didn't stop her from sighing. For someone who shrouded himself in darkness, he was just so obvious about everything. What was the point of owning his neuroses if he wasn't going to have any fun with them? And tonight of all nights. Better late than never.

The lobby of the Grand Hotel Gotham looked like New Year's Eve after a milder sort of apocalypse. Some hoodlum had left a vintage bottle of Dom Perignon to chill in now tepid waters. Selina rescued it from profanation.

Behind the gold-plated front desk, a familiar punk with an AK-47 strapped on his back had security footage running on a large monitor. The feed to the east entrance was blank, no doubt courtesy of the Batman. A cork bounced off that screen with a bang.

When wide-eyed Luis wheeled around to see her slinking up in her catsuit, he whipped back to look behind him.

Chuckling, Selina leaned over and pulled his face against the desk she hopped up to lounge on. She bent her knee so her razor-heel was next to his nose.

"You wouldn't believe the night I've had," she lamented. "I had to talk to some pretty low people. And even they didn't care one little bit where you were." She twisted the serrated blade to catch the light. "So lie to me again, and who's gonna miss you?"

"Jen's here," Luis was eager to sputter. "I was just about to give the signal for them to come down."

"So give the signal." Selina traded his head for her bottle of champagne.

Luis watched her take a swig out of the corner of his eye as he flickered the lights. She spat out the taste and dumped the rest of the bottle out on red carpeting. Like everything the least bit enjoyable in Gotham, the booze had gone flat.

The main staircase filled with hushed teenagers and twenty-somethings. A blonde head pushed through the despondent crowd, rushing toward the front desk. Raising her mask along with her eyebrows, Selina got down to accept a forceful hug. Jen was near tears, but it was still the first time in weeks she was happy to see Selina.

"Thank God you found me in time." Jen pulled back a little. "Who told you? Detective Blake?"

"I heard a rumor." No wonder they all looked so remorseful. The threat of nuclear annihilation did that.

"There's only a few hours left, but Luis says he can get us inside the sewers."

Two more repentant guns for Bane came in the front entrance, announcing clear streets. Holding onto one another, the crowd began filing down the stairs and through rotating doors.

Jen had their same calm. "We'll be safe down there. Like a bomb shelter."

Selina wondered how many of these kids had finished high school and, like Jen, were deluding themselves. But all she said was, "I'm sure they will be," and waited for Luis to pass. She took Jen's hands. "I'm getting us out of the city."

"'Us,'" Jen repeated with caution, her fingers clinging hard. "How – Wait." She started pulling Selina toward the crowd. "You can tell us all together."

Standing firm, Selina replied, "There are forty people over there."

"We've got limos big enough for everybody."

Perfect targets for exacting terrorists and on-edge soldiers alike. She was not about to have that on her head, too.

"About the only good reason to bring them along would be to draw fire," Selina said, quick as ripping off a band-aid. She moved to block Jen's quivering lip from the smaller crew waiting for her in the lobby. "I came for you."

Waterworks erupted in an instant. "You – " The contempt on Jen's face twisted the flow of her tears.

"Listen – I made a deal for myself. I'm already pushing my luck bringing you."

"Bullshit! You just don't want the 'inconvenience,' right?"

"Go ahead and hate me," was all Selina had for that point. She took hold of Jen's elbow and tugged her along to the east exit. "But do it while I'm saving your life."

"I'm not leaving them," Jen said, raising her voice. "Luis!"

The look Selina shot over her shoulder was enough to stop him in his tracks. His resigned expression told her that he knew, as sure as Jen did, that getting to the sewers was nothing more than a desperate cry for hope.

"Luis wants you to live, princess," Selina snapped, pushing Jen through the glass double doors. She fell to the icy sidewalk and stayed there. Crossed her arms and looked so much like her sister it hurt. Selina told her to get up. She refused.

"You owe me," Selina hissed. Their deal when Jen had begged to stay with her in the city – "What I said, when I said it, remember?"

"I owe you, you feel sorry for me – none of it means anything! You couldn't wait to leave, just like you left Holly – " Jen didn't even take a breath when Selina tried to cut her off. "And Holly left and so did Gran." Gran died, that wasn't her fault. If Jen died, it would be Selina's. She repeated her command, but Jen wasn't finished. "I am not leaving them because they'd never leave me!"

Selina reached down and picked her up by her hair. "Get the fuck up, Jen!"

Jen howled like a wounded animal, flailed, and slapped Selina so hard her mask fell back into place. Selina didn't flinch. Jen was slow to back away. Behind her in the dark distance, light flared.

From high up on the Wayne Memorial Bridge, fire in the shape of a bat lit up over Gotham.

Selina stayed on Jen's heels as they rounded the corner for a better view. The lack of subtly was a strategy questionable at best. But hell if it wouldn't strike like lightning to the heart of anyone who'd ever whispered his legend in the dark.

Through his shock, Luis motioned for his electrified crew to keep packing into the three limos lining the curb. Inside, they crowded windows to stare up at the burning symbol, their mouths hanging open in awe a breath away from fear. That Gotham City look of hope.

All the adoration that had blown away in the Storm flooded Jen's raised eyes. "Is he really back?"

"He'll save them," Selina lied, taking her by the shoulders. "Let me save you."

"I'm not afraid." Jen winced when she said it. But she bit off her next words with more conviction than Selina would have thought she had in her – "I'd rather die with a family than live alone like you."

A variation on a theme that still made her spit, "You're being melodramatic."

"You're in a cat costume."

Selina's heart tightened. Her grip loosened. "Goddamn you," she said and glared as Jen threw herself into a limousine full of victims calling her name.

Jen was crying again when she stood up high in the open roof, aided by the pile of arms clinging to her. Selina refused to raise even one to return her wave. Jen kissed her own forehead goodbye with two fingers. Selina turned her back.

From the day she'd opened her baby blue eyes and taken the city into her big soft heart, Jen Robinson had been a cause as lost as Gotham.

Selina's receding footfalls left no mark on its last starless night.

* * *

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_  


* * *

The room was as dark as ever when Selina opened her eyes. Sit up, she told her body even as it curled in tighter. Her abdomen pushed against the mattress, each shallow breath taking her back to the oppressive silence of those long, cold winter nights. A city of millions petrified of giving away any sign of life.

With a violent jerk, she rolled herself to the edge of the bed. A button in the nightstand swept back thick curtains. The muted light was enough for her to read the tiny gold hands on the clock. She'd slipped out of time by eighteen hours.

Selina steadied herself before getting to her feet, rubbing her aching neck. She stood at the wall-length window and raised her hand to the semi-opaque film that covered it. Another product of Bruce's paranoia, no doubt, since the window was built flush against the cliff-face. Her fingers flexed with the desire to peel off the thin barrier. Three small scratch marks were all she left. Not her problem.

In the bathroom, the vanity was her ally again. Selina took her time concealing and accentuating. She brushed her hair straight until it shone. She paired a fitted shirt and a structured jacket with tailored jeans. The clack of her heels against tile and wood was as reassuring as deep breaths.

Half as many strides as stairs, and Selina was closer to daylight than she had been in days. From the rack by the front door, her coat and scarf hung over her ready suitcase.

The decoy cabin's single bedroom was as empty and tidy as Selina expected. Grabbing his tattered hiking pack, she dumped the contents out on the thin mattress. A plastic bag contained a German energy bar wrapper and a receipt from a gas station in the port city of Bremen, corroborating his story that he'd come by ship and then by car. A note rife with insults in near-illiterate Cyrillic passed ownership of the Jeep to Bruce, who seemed to be something of a card shark. Had he raked in his final earnings with a broad victor's laugh? She doubted it.

Leaving the rest of the pile unexplored, Selina forced herself back down through his trap door.

At the other end of the underground cabin, blue-gray light reflected on glass-covered walls and shone up into the hall. Intermittent interruptions to the light evoked wings.

Two weeks of nothing but that room and his ghost. She'd never let anyone make her world so small.

When Bruce hauled himself up from his cave, Selina was in the kitchen rounding up spices. Anything to improve what would be her last sad tin of canned tuna, or so help her. She seasoned a bowl and watched Bruce mix chalk protein in water. He was bracing himself on the counter, favoring his bad knee and side.

Disappointment came like déjà vu, the robe and beard taking her back to when they'd met. What a waste, she thought again. And bit her lip under a snort.

He shifted to stand straighter, regarding her with caution.

Condolence added to her amusement. "You look like something the cat dragged in."

The brim of his glass hovered near his turned-down mouth. "That's…" His eyebrow cocked. "Extremely accurate," Bruce concluded and gulped down the entire glass. The orange supplement had the consistency of her tuna. He poured himself another.

"Okay." Selina put her bowl in the sink. "This is the worst client dinner I've ever had. And I've been poisoned."

He stated, "I'm a client now," and came toward her. She backed no further into the counter, even as he reached over her to the cabinet above.

"My little pet name for people who blackmail me into working for them." She didn't turn her head from the silk sleeve that brushed her nose, not betraying the least bit of interest in his clean, strong scent.

Bruce took his time to unscrew the lid from the heavy plastic container and set it down. "It's not blackmail." His body was a brief weight on hers before he moved away. "Think of it as a thank you."

"Gordon told me you didn't accept thanks."

Bruce leaned against the corner inches away, looking at her from under raised eyebrows. "From you, I'll take what I can get."

"Attractive," she said with forced sarcasm. "But I'm afraid I only accept one charity case per quarter."

"Saving my life was charity now," he said, and bit into something that looked like actual chalk.

'One,' Selina mouthed and put down the finger she'd held up. "Company policy."

"Well, it's a good thing I took back my accounts." He popped another pellet. If he choked on it, she wouldn't have minded. The mess she'd made of his finances should have taken him a lot longer than half a day to clear up. His shrug was as minimalist as it was annoying. "I had to occupy myself somehow. While you slept like the dead."

"But awoke like the living." She ended a small flourish with red nails touching her neck. "You should try it."

"I'll keep to my own vices." He washed down his dry chalk with his wet chalk.

Selina followed the bob of his Adam's apple to the mark on his throat where she'd nicked him with the rapier. "Don't they make pills for crippling masochism?"

He didn't rise to her jab. "You're disappointed." Bruce tipped his glass into the sink, glancing her way. "You'd hoped…"

"To be fucked into oblivion?" Selina waited for him to drag his eyes from her lips. She swept her eyes downward. "Now that you mention it."

His clamped jaw worked. He was probably running his tongue along the top of his coated mouth. Even if she provoked a move out of him, he wouldn't be able to taste her. Bruce should have thought of that.

Selina backed away smirking. Like her mother always said, 'Never trust a man whose first priority isn't under your skirt.'

Jaw still tight, Bruce tracked her exit. "And in the morning?"

"Champagne." She hung in the archway, her jacket gaping open to a deep scoop-neck. "'No hard feelings.' 'Until we meet again.'"

Bruce took his aloof lean up a notch, crossing his ankles and bracing his hands on either counter. "Last time we were together your line was, 'Come with me.'" His second reference to that dawn.

He wasn't going to see it faze her. "Please. You wouldn't survive an act that selfish."

"Then why ask?"

"I like having someone around to open doors for me," was her ready reply.

But something about his tone struck her a moment later as too casual, his words too quick. He might have lain awake nights, wondering, taking himself to task for being unable to roll over and forget. And now he was here with her against his will, chafing at his own skin.

Her sympathy was harsh. "Or maybe I was hoping for something more," Selina said, and went into the hall. It was a relief, for a change, not to be the one dismissed.

* * *

— _Gotham City, March 2016—_  


* * *

Nothing unusual about docks lined with crates, but Selina, desperate for distraction, took a peek. Inside one were hundreds of files stolen from banks throughout the city. Another had a jumble of hard drives. An unnecessary cause given that the ground under her feet was about to be blown off the map – but so much more the way all this was supposed to have gone down.

When the Batman showed up, Selina was taking a savage delight in the crack of broken ice. She lobbed a king's ransom mortgage on an orphanage as far out into the Gotham River as she could.

In that growl of his, he asked her, "What about these?" and indicated the files she'd set aside.

Those deserved their debts, but Selina wasn't about to give him the satisfaction of calling her Robin Hood again. Even with nothing but his chin open to her gaze, she could tell Bruce was thinking it. Selina kicked the pile. The city's inequities stopped being her problem with a splash. They wouldn't be anyone's problem much longer.

She pushed past Bruce to get them both moving. "Clock's a-ticking, handsome. Where's my out?"

He fell into step with her, matching her pace as he led her down trash-clogged alleyways that stank like a toilet. The docks hadn't changed much in five months.

She was about to crack wise about how she would miss romantic strolls through the gutter on snowy Gotham mornings. He distracted her by pressing a button that opened a rusted metal container like the lid off a parting gift.

Inside was the most beautiful beast of a motorcycle she'd ever had the pleasure of ogling on the eleven o'clock news.

"You shouldn't have," Selina purred. He didn't contradict her presumption, so she put a little extra oomph in her walk for him. Least she could do.

A lesser man would have needed to clear his throat. "The Midtown tunnel's blocked by debris, but the cannons give you enough firepower to make a path for people."

Those dark eyes on her, Selina stretched a leg over his machine and settled herself on top of its molded contours.

"Wait until the fighting begins."

"You're gonna wage a war to save your stuck-up girlfriend?" To hell with pride. She leaned over to take the controls. Dead men told no tales.

The Batman ignored her jealous outburst as sure his alter ego had. Attention on the motorcycle, he said, "To start it, throttle – "

She revved the engine to cut him off. "I got it." Raising her head, she was gratified to see his lowered in acknowledgement.

"We've got forty-five minutes to save this city," he said, stepping out of her path.

Selina rolled his cycle to a halt. "No," she said and sat up. "I've got forty-five minutes to get clear of the blast radius." She enunciated her warning: "Because you don't stand a chance against these guys."

Unflappable, the Batman looked down on her. "With your help I might."

Selina gritted her teeth. Deal or no deal, she should have known he'd pull something like this. Her words came out fast, leaving no room for negotiation – "I'll open that tunnel, then I'm gone."

From behind his mask, he tried to see through her own. "There's more to you than that." Had anyone else ever heard the Batman and Bruce Wayne sound so much like one?

Regret, churning and full, threatened to overwhelm her most hollow self. It took all her strength of self-preservation to hold his stare. "Sorry to keep letting you down."

He stood beside her in silence, as if waiting for her to realize that she didn't have to. As if for him she could make a choice that would matter.

She leaned into Bruce. "Come with me." No one else had ever heard Selina sound so imploring. "Save yourself. You don't owe these people any more." All the emotions this man had made her feel in spite of herself – hope, want, regret, outrage – bled her voice raw. "You've given them everything."

"Not everything. Not yet." Said on a breath as long as the one she was holding.

Bruce turned and the Batman vanished into the coming dawn.

Gears ground the container door shut. Another dismissal, the second time he'd given up on her. And nothing in this hell on earth could make her stay to watch his death in encore. Selina raked her goggles over stung eyes. She took off like shot with what she was owed and nothing more, gunning the engines as if she could ever put enough distance between herself and the cost.

* * *

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_  


* * *

Selina swore she could feel the indents from her ass checks in the leather chair. Calling herself pathetic was flattery at this point. The rut she'd gotten into was much more self-loathing.

Bruce had left his screens open, either to entice her curiosity or to let her know she didn't need to snoop. Neither alternative was all that interesting. She clicked through his files, unsurprised to see that he'd been trying to dig up dirt on the companies he'd made his donations to. So far, everything he'd sifted through lacked a flair for theatrical terrorism.

Hearing his knee cracking on the slope, Selina baited, "You mentioned an hallucinogen?"

"They call themselves the League of Shadows," was Bruce's defense. "Bane was a distraction. Talia al Ghul was the real threat, more dangerous because she was concealed." Bruce came to stand next to her chair. "But you're right. I could use the right kind of mind to go through all this."

That pitch had sounded better in writing. "You want a personal secretary, take out an ad – 'Wanted: One female, brunette, with stars in her big, blue eyes, and a loose interpretation of international privacy laws.'" Selina got up and held the spinning chair. "As for me, you'd better have something a hell of lot more stylish."

Bruce tucked the tails of his robe and took a seat. "Does wiping a two thousand year-old cloak-and-dagger conspiracy off the face of the earth strike you as stylish?"

Rolling her eyes, Selina walked around the desk to the far wall. "Hate to be the uncooperative one – I'm sure Blake will jump at the chance to be your new toy soldier, if he hasn't already – but you should've known better than to think economics would be a game I'd be interested in playing."

"So you did read my journal." Bruce folded his hands in his lap.

Her smile was as sweet as arsenic. "Only the last page. Ending sucked."

"It wasn't the end." He didn't have even the decency to look ashamed of himself, just rotated back toward the screens. "As it turned out."

"The Batman died. Bruce Wayne died." Selina put her hands on the glass to push against the endless, shrieking mouth of his cavern. "You're a lucky son of a bitch, but all you want is to sit in the dark and raise demons."

"The League of Shadows is flesh and blood. You should know."

Selina turned on him. "Yeah, for the guy with the strict 'no guns, no killing' policy you sure do have the luxury of dead enemies."

The monitors concealed Bruce's thoughts on that.

"I don't," she asserted, coming back toward him. "Mine are everywhere, and they've all got unfinished business. Am I gonna let that stop me from getting life?"

"Your enemies didn't try to destroy a city of millions on three occasions decades apart."

"Three?" Selina echoed, startled.

Bruce cocked his head. "I thought you didn't want to know."

"You're right." Selina waved it off and perched herself on the edge of the clear plastic desk. "I say all the more reason to avoid them."

"I tried that. Members of the League require a strict hierarchy to act. Without leadership, they should have crumbled. But there were too many structures in place." Bruce started to glaze over, one of his hands rubbing the wound at his side. "Gotham cannot afford for me to miss another opportunity to dismantle their façade of institutionalized – "

Selina spun him into her eye-line, the point of her boot against his inner thigh. "I get it, you've got reasons. They might even be good ones. But that doesn't change the fact that this isn't my fight. Find someone else."

"No one in Gotham can know I survived. I won't risk it."

She could be just as blunt. "You had Fox wait with the reactor, you told Gordon to hide in the truck. Blake was the one cop you wouldn't let join your cannon fodder brigade." Selina leaned into Bruce. "But me you expected on the frontline."

"I couldn't trust them not to get themselves killed."

Selina ran her fingers through Bruce's hair. "Oh, you trusted me. Sounds better than, 'That backstabbing bitch is expendable,' I suppose."

He reached out to pull her face so close she had to steady herself with her forearms digging into his shoulders. "I told you when I forgave you." His mouth was rough brushing against hers, his mint-fresh breath a brief victory. "If anyone could have gotten out from under Bane's thumb, it was you."

"Bruce," she said, her voice lowering in pity as she put her weight on his knees. "You really think I didn't try?"

"Not hard enough, apparently," he said, his thumb rubbing gentle circles on her cheek. "Just like you tried to leave, but you came back for me. Because deep down you knew it was the right thing to do."

Nothing to do but shake off his delusion. "You still don't know a thing about me."

* * *

— _Gotham City, March 2016—_  


* * *

The city was left to abandon in the morning twilight. Gotham had taken shelter. Selina alone rushed toward the skyline.

Not her fault. She pushed herself to speeds that made icy winds into a punishment that screamed through the cracks in her goggles. In the blur of sight and sound – not her fault, not her fault. She was small in the narrow space between penthouses and skyscrapers.

An adjustment as minute as a flinch turned the cycle away from the financial district and toward residential streets. She was forced to slow on roads that couldn't stand the abuse. Modest brownstones took shape as her ears rang in their silence. Ahead, the Midtown tunnel was stacked four layers thick with cars better suited to lining soccer fields.

Selina brought the cycle to a stop, the tunnel direct in her line of fire. She idled the engine as she sat up, but her hands still gripped the controls. Eager for action, movement. Escape. Seconds dragged. Minutes tortured.

She didn't want to wait.

The one part of their deal that required any amount of trust, and it was getting to be too much for her. Shame grabbed her by the throat, where fear was already lodged.

The walls around Selina were never tighter. Twice she'd stuck her neck out and tried to do the right thing, the smart thing, and twice she'd been rejected in favor of the righteous thing. The only two people in a city of twelve million she'd let affect her life – and they would rather die in hope than live with her in reality.

Gotham had been reduced to survival or suicide because of righteous things. The Siege and the Storm, and the Dent Act that had made it all so appealing.

Selina had been righteous. She was still alive to regret it only because she had also been selfish.

That was who she was. That was why she'd chosen to be a con artist and criminal. He'd dismissed her redeeming qualities, so what in the hell was he after? His claim to see 'more' where there was only want – a manipulation or a product of his desperation. Either way.

They were just words. As ineffectual as the ones she'd used to try to make him believe that, if anyone in Gotham City deserved to live, it was Bruce. They were all in his debt, none more than Selina.

Well before the fighting began, she was already looking back.

Her tuned goggles amplified the brute force of treads booming over pavement. She quit breathing to better hear the whirl of his plane's engines. She steeled herself for the inevitable assault – but cheers came instead, followed by the clash of weaponless bodies.

He'd raised an army with a symbol.

Selina cut the feed. Precision lenses back over her eyes, she got into position. One blast from the cannons, and the Siege of Gotham was broken.

The gaping hole she'd made was wide enough for three limos, side-by-side, and deep enough for all the bigger choices she could have made.

In homes, curtains pulled back like staring eyes.

He'd sent her to save them, these people lucky enough to be the vicinity. He didn't expect the able-bodied among them to sacrifice their sure escape to join his doomed crusade.

What was the difference between the ones who were marked for salvation, the Miranda Tates of this world, and her? Selina had been asking herself that question since she'd learned how. Accident or design? Opportunity of birth. Clean hands and slates.

She thought of Jen and Luis, huddled without the sun. Thought of Dino and his mother, who knew by now that they would never get what they were owed. Of Horace, too drunk to regret anything but the millions he'd thrown away on his wife's absent company. And Blake, with his neighborhood watches and food drives, with his single-minded devotion that kept the rabid masses acting enough like people.

She thought of Bruce Wayne and what had made him the Batman. The money, the muscle, the Messiah complex.

All Selina had was the anger, the hot ache in her marrow. The anger that made her good, he'd insisted. For Selina, it was the anger that made her act.

She thought of her frozen city, of all the times she'd watched it burn and felt righteous.

Behind her, the neighborhood had spilled onto South Street. But they kept their distance, still more afraid of false hope than they were of the blast. She choked the throttle. They watched her turn her back on the tunnel, silent as a funeral.

That suited her just fine. She wasn't in this for heroic mention, nor was she in the grip of delusion.

Thirty years worth of scores to settle with Gotham before Selina Kyle could cash in her salvation.

* * *

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_  


* * *

Bruce was trying to figure out what kind of lies she was telling as Selina got up from his lap. "I said I'd help you one last time. What do I have to do?"

He remained still, apart from his eyes roving over her lashes, her cheeks, her nose. Settling on her lips. Bruce stood up to kiss her like a man used to saying goodbye.

Her arms were wound around his neck when he reached between them to bring up a file. She let them slide away. Bruce paused his rapid search on the Wayne Enterprises employee dossier of one Miranda Salomé Tate. For a murderous sociopath, she really was quite photogenic.

The dead faux philanthropist's head shot he dragged into a program already open to the living cat burglar's mug shot. One click and Miranda Tate's face was Selina Kyle's.

When Bruce looked back at her, he was braced for a slap.

Selina pushed him instead, pinning him to his chair. "Well, well, a selfish act," she cooed, then shoved off of him. "Now I've seen everything."

Pulling up a blur of relevant documents, Bruce explained, "Miranda Tate was a cipher created for Gotham by a Rykin Data prototype. You can become her as easily as you can disappear afterward."

"And spend the rest of what would be a very short life dodging assassins?" Her laugh was disbelieving. "You have thirty seconds to make me a better offer."

Over steepled fingers, he said, "I can make it worth your risk."

"Really, Bruce." Her lip curled. "Money?"

His hands fell open on a note of exasperation. "I don't know what you want."

"You know exactly what I want," she said, gripping onto what was left of her vow to play him cool. "You gave it to me yourself."

He regarded her as if he were sorting through a dozen more convincing cards to put down against her. A gut-sinking prospect.

"Five seconds."

"I shouldn't have asked." He discarded the program. "I'll think of something else."

She was suspicious in an instant, but her desperate relief was too great to care. "That's more like it. I was almost impressed." To avoid the exhaustion lines etching his face, Selina brushed her fingertips through his beard. The plan was to leave on the dawn of a new day and it was dusk now. Could she stand to stay for twelve more hours? Did she even want to?

"No hard feelings," he murmured, a step ahead of her as usual.

"Until we meet again." Selina drew at his lips for a moment before she had to leave him.

On her way out, she cast her eyes over his pajamas, his monitors, his bats.

"Bruce."

He looked up from the holy war he'd already returned to. The one for which he thought no sacrifice would ever be enough.

"It doesn't matter why I came back for you." Neither did her disappointment matter. The world – Selina's world – was better because Bruce was still in it. She couldn't say the same for any other man. "Try as hard as you like, you can't make me sorry I did."

Bruce answered Selina's thin smile. But the grimace behind his made hers falter when she turned away.

* * *

— _Gotham City, March 2016—_  


* * *

Selina was a minute away from useful but coming in reckless fast. She ratcheted up the binocular function on her goggles. Uniforms and longcoats blurred as Gotham's finest brawled with terrorists outside City Hall. Her search for a glimpse of a black cape in the melee was interrupted by a burgundy tunic.

Vindication stronger than shock rippled through Selina. The wolf bitch had removed her sheep's clothing.

Miranda Tate – whoever she was – climbed into one of three camouflage tumblers exiting the fray. Beside her, Barsard was picked off by the GCPD, but she didn't even flinch. The convoy unleashed indiscriminate fire, sending people flying like so much debris.

To avoid adding to the carnage, Selina forced the cycle into an alley so narrow tires rubbed concrete. Emerged, she saw Deputy Commissioner Foley, who'd made a career hidden behind the Dent Act, standing his ground in full regalia. Bullets from his sidearm peppered the windows of the lead tumbler even as that once perfect damsel-in-distress mowed him down.

Selina imagined she'd done that and worse to Bruce.

The sight of Foley's body in shredded dress blues galvanized what was left of the Gotham PD. She left them to their battle as she rode the cycle straight up the stairs to City Hall.

Through open doors, she watched, in close-up, a thickset hand level a shotgun to a cowl.

Bruce stared down a double-barrel.

Selina fired both missiles.

Faced with his own reckoning, the masked zealot never knew what hit him. The force of the cannons lifted him off his feet and slammed Bane's smoking, lifeless flesh against the far wall. Marble and plaster smoldered.

Shaken after casting off such a heavy burden, Selina gasped, "About that whole 'no guns' thing?" She lifted her goggles to find Bruce open-mouthed and stunned. "I'm not sure I feel as strongly about it as you do." The quip was supposed to snap him into action.

Yet, even as she climbed off his cycle, his raised eyes continued to stare into her as if she were a hot burst of sunlight – as if she were his hope renewed for all the faith he'd put into his good people of Gotham.

Selina had been born to this city a debt and she'd left it a prize. Never had she been a gift. Not to anyone.

She came with a price. Blood from his side dripped at her feet. Her best self by far had saved his life with seconds to spare. A good person would have gotten to him sooner.

Ignoring the obvious agony it caused, Bruce let her raise him up.

"We need to force that convey east to the entrance of the reactor," he forced out.

Selina hovered next to him, too anxious to touch him again or even to speak.

"I need you on the ground. I'll be on the air. Go."

Selina went. No protest. The battle wasn't finished. They weren't finished, not yet. She'd seen in his stare how much more there was to give.

* * *

— _St. Moritz, April 2016—_  


* * *

Framed in the archway, a flute of champagne had been placed on the counter for her. Beside it was the gift she'd intended to leave him.

She slid her hand under the book, carried all the way from Gotham City. Tucked in the pages was a slip of thick white paper. She held it between her fingers as she skimmed to find the passage he'd wanted her to read.

Her eyes closed for a moment before she could force herself to feel the full impact of each word: 'Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning him-self to let it eat him away.'

On the back of the paper, Bruce had written, 'Sorry to keep letting you down,' in clear, even letters.

With the pen he'd used, Selina crossed those words out with a double line. She added another for good measure, then another and another because she never wanted to see them again. Her straight lines became jagged hatch marks that grew until black ink spread corner to corner. She stopped only when the weight of her hand started to tear the paper.

The other side remained untarnished and clean and white. In flourished cursive, Selina wrote three words that had stuck with her through all her years of false starts.

Taking the champagne flute, she toasted her own renewal. She refilled the glass and rotated it as she set it down. Against the stem of his bubbling flute, she propped her message. A cry for help met with a challenge, sealed with an enticement.

Her red lip stain and 'Recalled to Life' would be visible from the hall.

Out of the dark she climbed and walked, squinting, into the light. She reached in her purse for her sunglasses and secured  _A Tale of Two Cities_  in their place so she could load her suitcase.

She looked back at the squat, shadowed cabin. Last place on earth anyone would expect to find even broke, eccentric Bruce Wayne, never mind Batman, Defender of Gotham. He'd be sheltered, at least. That would have to do for now.

Selina followed the sunset down the mountain. Spring had come while she'd been underground. Waters freed from ice reflected blue and red. She raised her chin with the changing winds. Her skin breathed.

* * *

—  _Florence + the Machine —_  


* * *

_We raise it up, this offering, we raise it up_

_This is a gift, it comes with a price, who is the lamb and who is the knife?_

_Midas is king and he holds me so tight and turns me to gold in the sunlight_

_Raise it up, raise it up, raise it up, raise it up_

_And in the spring I shed my skin and it blows away with the changing wind_

_The waters turn from blue to red as towards the sky I offer it_

* * *

_For extras related to this chapter, visit **thatcraftykid-spectrum dot tumblr dot com**  and click the 5. A RABBIT-HEARTED GIRL tag._

_Disclaimer: **"You're not my original work. You're practice."**  All rights to Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros. Studios, and DC Comics. No infringement intended._


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